We recently conducted a survey in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa looking at the state of back-up and sharing uptake and concerns from a consumer perspective. We found a huge demand (and opportunity for MNOs) for personal cloud services, including sharing services.
73 percent of survey respondents said they would use sharing services if offered by their operator – with six billion cell phone subscriptions in the world, that’s potentially 4.5 billion users willing to share. As with any technology in the digital age, the key feature in any sharing solution is security (69 percent of respondents agreed with this).
The good news for operators is that 60 percent of consumers are prepared to pay for secure sharing services. Indeed, there are many ways that operators can cater for this growing consumer demand, which can be categorized as follows, drawing on user segmentation (let us know below which category you fall into):
- Techno Pragmatics – 36 percent of users constantly back up their data, choosing a solution based on price or data security. They are interested in advanced security features and share frequently, but only with selected contacts
- Cyber Addicts – 14 percent of users possess a lot of mobile content and back it up. Transfer speeds and brand reputation are important to them and they share pictures with many contacts almost every day via social networks. They are also willing to try new and innovative features
- Digital Learners – 21 percent of users don’t know how to back up their phone because they don’t know how. They are afraid to send information, including images, over the internet
- Hesitating Followers – 10 percent of users are interested in cloud and sharing services but the lack the equipment or financial capability to do so. They share from their PC rather than their cell phone, but would love to do so from more devices
- Unconcerned – 19 percent of users rarely back up their phone as very few have ever lost their mobile content. They rarely share photos or back up their content
MNOs have always kept private user data and consumers have placed years of trust in their provider. It’s reassuring for consumers that this is a natural progression on the journey to the mobile cloud. To help initiate this shift, Gemalto is launching CloudnShare, a secure mobile and web private sharing service. It lets you instantly share all your documents, photos, videos, music with anyone, just using your mobile contacts. See a video demonstration here:
httpv://youtu.be/7q909gHHDOg
You have only to look at the most popular pages on the web (YouTube and Facebook) to see that we love to share with our contacts all over the world. While sometimes we are happy to share our news with all our social contacts, sometimes we like to be more private and share just with those closest to us. Private sharing solutions give us an easy, secure way to do this from our mobiles. Whether it’s important documents, photos, videos or music, don’t keep it to yourself, share the wealth!
