Inspired by Excelacom's excellent and popular "What happens in an Internet minute" infographic, we've put together a nerdier version pertaining to data centers using data from our recent Global Cloud Index along with a few other figures. It's just as impressive in our view, if a little more obscure.

For the two figures in the infographic that come from the Cisco Global Cloud Index, we have projections for what this graphic might look like by 2020:

• Instead of 200 million gigabytes of new data saved each day, we expect there to be 600 million gigabytes of new data saved each day by 2020, 200 million gigabytes of which will be in big data deployments. In other words,the volume of big data by 2020 will be as much as all of the stored data in all of the world's data centers today.

• Instead of 14 billion gigabytes of traffic within data centers, there will be 32 billion gigabytes transported. Traffic within the data center is significantly higher than the amount of data exiting data centers and will continue to be through 2020. See our whitepaper for more details.

The scale and complexity of data center operations is mind-bending, and only continues to grow. High growth is compelling data center operators to seek means of streamlining and automating the management of traffic, workloads, and data, and is accelerating the adoption of software-defined networking and storage. By 2020, we expect two-thirds of all data center traffic to be handled by SDN/NFV infrastructures.

Rapid evolution and growth should make for an exciting 2017! Learn how Cisco ASAP (Analyze. Simplify. Automate. Protect.) data center solutions can transform your cloud infrastructure.