Communications and Technology Industry Research

Slowly and steadily, it seems, people have started trusting personal clouds, also known as digital lockers. In a survey conducted by Funambol (News - Alert), 67 percent of respondents have stated they are willing to pay up to $5 dollar as fee for storing rich online data in digital lockers.

The survey results indicate that there is a large untapped market for digital locker services, and also complements Forrester (News - Alert) Research's recent estimate that the personal cloud market would reach $12B in the U.S. by 2016.

People are genuinely interested in using personal clouds so long as they are secure, private and support the devices they own, says the report.

The results indicated that 75 percent of users plan to use the personal cloud to store rich media and digital data, and that 67 percent of users would be willing to pay to use such services, with $5 per month being the most popular price point.

The survey focused on people's views and attitudes towards cloud services like Apple’s (News - Alert) iCloud. It also included a wide range of questions about current and planned use of personal clouds.

Interestingly, as much as 88 percent of respondents said they plan to store contacts in the cloud, 85 percent said files, 80 percent said calendar, 69 percent said photos. Nearly 81 percent of them said they would store 25 and 75 percent of their data in the cloud.

A significant number of people said that they would use it for both business and personal purposes. 67 percent said they would be willing to pay a monthly fee, with $5 being the most likely amount.

More than half of respondents said managing multiple personal clouds could become a big issue in the future.

Funambol, itself is a personal cloud solutions vendor, claims to have collected opinion from 232 people in 49 countries. And the company says only handful of respondents were its own customers.

 "Survey data is often subject to a wide degree of interpretation, but we were careful to ensure the objectivity of the results, as we wanted to get a clear picture of the needs of personal cloud users," said Hal Steger, Funambol VP of Marketing.

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