Let’s talk about the results from the survey around Cloud Storage and File Services we ran last month.
The survey was posted on Framaforms on October 12th and was pushed here on community, on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Link to the survey here: https://framaforms.org/cloud-storage-and-file-sharing-services-1539331923
Link to the initial post on community here: https://community.e.foundation/t/looking-to-know-more-about-cloud-storage-and-file-transfer-services-to-fine-tune-our-future-e-offerings/411
About 250 people took the survey on Framaforms, which is great for a first one! This is far from our complete community user base but nonetheless a great amount of feedback. Thanks to all the participants for taking a few minutes to take this survey!
Key findings:
A majority of respondents (79%) use a file sharing or cloud storage service.
Main Services Used:
- Google Drive is the most common service, used by 48% of respondents.
- Dropbox & Microsoft OneDrive are the 2nd and 3rd most common services.
- Only 8.8% of respondents use iCloud.
- MEGA has more traction than iCloud.
- Newest services (Box) or more advanced (Tresorit) are lagging behind in terms of adoption.
Type of Service:
- For the vast majority (55%), these services are for personal use.
- We should note that 25% of respondents said they combine personal and business use for the same service.
- 20% of respondents with a personal use mentioned paying a subscription.
What about Free Users
- The majority of Free users store a relatively small amount of data, about 25% of their granted capacity, knowing that thresholds for a paid subscription are often around 5 Gb, up to 15Gb with Google Drive.
- For Free users, accessibility through a variety of devices is the most important benefit, followed by ease of use and capacity available.
- In light of few responses about customer and technical support, it is likely these users haven’t met any serious issues using these services.
What about Paid Users
- Like with free users, accessibility through a variety of devices is the most important benefit for paid users, followed by ease of use.
- Surprisingly, value for money is the 3rd most important benefit, is paid storage seen as cheap overall?
- As with free users, Customer and Technical support aren’t seen as major key benefits.
- A limited amount of paid users use the default service coming with their smartphone or computer. It is likely that they seek additional features not found in the default service.
- A majority of paid users have learned about the service they selected though online research.
We also had some direct feedback here on community on the survey thread highlighting other scenarios like self hosting or other storage services less mainstream.
We would like to thank you all for your time in answering these few questions, they will help us tremendously to shape and size our cloud services. We look forward to hearing your feedback again in the future.