The 3 Ps of Personal Clouds: Promises, Pitfalls and Problems

Hal Steger : Thinking Out Cloud
Hal Steger
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Funambol. 20+ years of marketing & product management experience at high-growth, innovative global software companies.
| This blog is about personal cloud solutions, technology, trends and market developments. Its scope is to comment on and discuss several aspects of personal clouds.

The 3 Ps of Personal Clouds: Promises, Pitfalls and Problems

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I learned three interesting things this week about personal clouds that I thought were worth sharing.

First, I saw the results of a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey of consumers on their views towards personal clouds. Here is a summary of the key results from my perspective: 

Research Shows Consumer Interest In Cloud Storage

Although this survey focused more on storing commercial content (such as music and movies) in a personal cloud rather than user generated content, its results were very consistent with a similar survey that we conducted earlier this year (that was more about user generated content). In particular, it showed that:

  • consumer awareness of cloud storage is quite high (61%)
  • consumer interest is very high (90%)
  • 32% are willing to pay $25-$99 per year, which was more than our survey that showed that 21% are willing to pay
  • the ranked benefits included free, view anywhere/any device, choice of download vs. stream, etc.

To me, this validation by an independent entity reinforces the tremendous promise and potential of personal clouds.

Second, I read a hot-off-the-press FixYa Cloud Storage Report that presents the results of a survey about personal cloud services and the issues reported by users. The top reported pitfalls by service were: 

  • Dropbox: security concerns (40%) and storage limits (25%)
  • Google Drive:  Folders Missing (30%) and syncing issues (20%)
  • Sugar Sync: No QuickBooks Support (30%) and lack of storage space (25%)
  • iCloud: Mountain Lion Update Errors (35%) and issues syncing with non-Apple device (25%)
  • Box: upload issues (25%) and security concerns (25%)

These results are not that surprising as it is challenging to provide a high quality personal cloud service for millions of users. The biggest takeaway to me is that users are still highly concerned about the security of their data in the cloud. This is consistent with market research that our company has performed over the years as well as other market studies. This points to a need as well as a major opportunity for providers to go over-and-beyond customary business practices to ensure the security of customer cloud data and to improve the perception of this. There is a trade-off between making a cloud service secure and easy-to-use. I would expect the next versions of these services to increasingly add more security safeguards to address these and other reported pitfalls.

Third. Apple has been in the news the past several days due to continued problems with iCloud. For example, this Gizmodo article, Apple Just Can't Keep iCloud In the Air, chronicles iCloud's recent problems as well as those since its inception and even before.

This is not to pour salt in any wounds because as the FixYa Cloud Storage Report illustrates, personal cloud services have issues of one sort or another. The thing I find interesting about iCloud, however, is that Apple has extensive resources and complete control over its hardware. If it is unable to make its personal cloud reliable, does this imply that personal cloud services are inherently unstable?

To me, the answer is no, but rather, the underlying technology of cloud storage services is quite complex, even though from a user's point of view, it appears simple.

The morale of the story is that personal cloud services are still fairly new and being improved, so as a user, it is important to be aware of this and to make sure that you have the option to use the personal cloud service that best meets your needs, not just the one that is built into your device or that appears to be the most convenient. 

Hope you find these things interesting as well. Happy Thanksgiving to all.