Users want to access all their content in just one secure place

Are you managing your content, or is your content managing you? An F-Secure survey shows that, with their photos, videos, and other documents scattered across various cloud services online and various devices at home, and with privacy concerns associated with cloud services, people are ready for innovations in how they manage their content.

Consumers are storing their content in many different places, from Facebook to Flickr and Google Drive to Evernote, to name a few, and that’s just online. There’s still the content people have in their mobile phones, laptops, tablets and computers, not to mention devices they use for work.

64% of consumers globally say it would be useful to have all their content accessible on all their devices wherever they are. Consumers in Malaysia, Latin America and the USA were the most ready for this, with 76% or more saying it would be useful, while 55% of those in European countries agreed it would be useful.

With the top cloud providers people upload their content to most frequently being Facebook, YouTube, Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive and Apple iCloud, there are still a bevy of smaller services where plenty of people store their content. One fifth of consumers in Malaysia, for example, upload content once a week or more to Instagram, 15% in the USA do so to Amazon Cloud Drive, and 13% in Poland to Picasa.

So, why not make things simple by combining all these varied services, making them accessible in one central location from any device? 59% of people globally agree this would be a good idea – with again, Latin America, Malaysia and the USA among the most enthusiastic respondents with 75% or more agreeing.

When asked which cloud providers would be the most important to include in a service like this, respondents chose, predictably, Facebook, YouTube, Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive, and iCloud, followed by Picasa, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Do you think you can trust your online backup service?