Gemalto Survey: Tremendous Untapped Potential for Mobile Personal Cloud Services

There is no doubt that with evolving technology, consumer awareness is also increasing and so is consumer demands. Knowing what the consumer needs and working toward satisfying those needs is good customer service, as anyone will tell you. But, what’s the bottom line here?

And this is exactly what Gemalto’s (News - Alert) global survey underscores with reference to the personal cloud, which is being regarded as one of the fastest growing areas in the mobile industry. Regarded as a leader in digital security, Gemalto in its global survey clearly indicates that there is immense potential for mobile network operators to introduce their own cloud-based data backup and sharing services to their subscribers.

Given Gartner’s (News - Alert) figures that place personal cloud accounts worldwide at over 500 million, and that cloud storage is estimated to grow to 36 percent in 2016 from seven percent in 2011, it appears that Gemalto does have a point.

The global survey highlighted the fact that security was an important factor and played an important part in the adoption of personal cloud services.

In fact, 80 percent of survey respondents indicated that they would resort to cloud services if it were provided by their own mobile operators and 60 percent were even willing to pay extra for guaranteeing security.

Overall, there appeared to be a strong response with a large majority evincing keen interest in backup and sharing services, notwithstanding the fact that the respondents had different end-user profiles. Perhaps this stemmed from the fact that almost 50 percent of the survey participants had experienced loss of personal content and also to the absence of any backup solution.

“The response from participants confirms that there is a fear amongst mobile users of losing valued personal content such as contact details, and the results show that more than half the respondents had already suffered losses at least once. This is an untapped market,” said Christelle Toureille, marketing director for the telecommunication division, Middle East and Africa, at Gemalto.

Gemalto advocates its LinqUs cloud backup solution that is being used to protect contact data to over 140 million mobile users worldwide. This is Gemalto’s new private file sharing and storage product that was showcased at the recent Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in Barcelona.