Craig Huitema, director of data center solutions at networking giant Cisco, discussed his take on the cloud and how it’s driving the evolution of the networking market, both in the datacenter and the average household, during an interview. The outline of his vision is that the consumer space is pushing the enterprise forward towards this direction, and this is the area where Cisco usually comes in.

Huitema described how organizations are upgrading their networks to address a growing demand for bandwidth, driven by three main factors.

“Organizations are facing a dramatic increase in demand for network bandwidth

This can be attributed to a number of things including:

• “New tools to access applications and data (access from smartphones, tablets and other non-traditional access tools)
• Data that formerly was stored close to the user on a local PC is increasingly being stored back in the data center
• The data people are creating, accessing and updating is both far larger than before and far more complex. This trend includes the increasing use of both structured data and non-structured data such as audio and video.”

The last two bulletins extend to include the enterprise as well. Consumers and organizations both leverage services such as Box and other cloud storage platforms. And at the same time, the big data industry is growing thanks to overwhelming demand for new ways to identify everything ranging between consumer behavior and infrastructure utilization trends.

Huitema also covered the impact of it all. Companies are forced to boost their networking backend with virtualization and other upgrades – preferably ones provided by Cisco – to be able to address the data explosion. And Cisco itself is trying to address the market by modifying its switches to support higher speeds of 40Gbps-100Gbps.

Vendors are trying to tap the rise of big data from several angles. Huitema and his colleagues are going after hardware, while the newly launched Sumo Logic provides an analytics-as-a-service from the cloud.  Most recently Cisco faces disruption from newcomer Nicira, which launched an industry first with its network-as-a-service product.