Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
A recent study commissioned by Juniper Networks and conducted by Censuswide suggests that in the U.K. this is not the case. Over 2,000 U.K. residents were surveyed regarding the use of the cloud-based services and the results were eye opening.
Over 20% of the survey participants said they did not use the cloud or if they did they did not understand the benefits of doing so. But, these same respondents responded positively when asked if they used such services as Instagram, Whatsapp and Spotify.
You might think that they just didn’t understand that these specific applications were cloud-based services. That shouldn’t be the case as they were provided a definition of what “the cloud” is prior to the survey responses. The definition they were provided went as follows: “Cloud technology, in this scenario, refers to a service or application that can be easily accessed by a consumer by a phone, tablet or PC providing access to content, services such as online banking or shopping and also storage and backup of data via a service such as the iPhone cloud for photos and documents for that individual.” At a minimum anyone who is an iPhone user should have understand the scenario.
Of the remaining respondents, 30% said they understand the value of the cloud and/or were actively utilizing cloud-based services. These users identified the greatest benefit of cloud services as the peace-of-mind it afforded them in knowing their data and memories would be safe if something happened to their device. This was followed by the ability to access their data at any time from anywhere via any device. Although for respondents under 24 years of age, the ability to access this data from anywhere was their number one factor, with more then half rating it as such.
Even more surprising is that more than 73% of respondents stated that cloud technology had not made a measureable, or even any, difference in their lives. This reinforces the statement above about the market not understanding what technology they are using when they utilize content services that are cloud-based.
At what price is data valued?
There was an amazing gap between the amount respondents were willing to pay to have their data restored if something happened to their device. About half of the respondents said they were willing to pay approximately $84 to have their data restored, while 2% (that’s 40 people) were willing to pay nearly $17,000. That’s a huge variance!
Another interesting metric from this study is that age really does play a role in how the answers to these questions stacked up.
Another interesting item related to age impacts the most important device in people’s lives. For those respondents under 55 years of age – the following was true:
- Laptop or tablet – 45.5% most important device.
- Tablet – 39.7% most important device.
- Smartphone – 22% most important device.
But in the over 55 age group, 31.5% considered their TV the most important device.
Lastly, another item worthy of noting is related to how users interact with their friends and family today. If you’re like me and you think that we’re becoming a society that doesn’t really know how to have face-to-face relationships, this survey corroborated that feeling. Seventy-percent of respondents said that they spend more timing interacting with family and friends via their laptop, tablet or smartphone as opposed to a face-to-face interaction.
This data clearly states that there is a huge gap in the understanding of cloud services in the customer segment. As a result there is also a huge opportunity for the telecom operator who manages to define and offer easy to understand services utilizing the cloud that drive the market awareness for this technology. Only then can these operators differentiate by having cloud-based services for the consumer market.
