The survey of 1,000 American adults conducted by Wakefield Research for cloud technology provider Citrix, found that 65% of people who say they don’t use the cloud actually bank online, while 63% shop online, and 58% use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Other cloud-based activities cited by people who don’t think they use the cloud include storing photos online (29%), storing music or videos online (22%) and using online file sharing (19%).
“There is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing,” said Kim DeCarlis, vice president of corporate marketing at Citrix, in an announcement of the survey results.
One in five Americans (22%) admits to pretending to know what the cloud is or how it works, the survey found – and of those respondents, one third said they fake it in the office, 14% said they do so during a job interview and 17% said they have pretended to understand the cloud during a first date.
After gauging respondents’ cloud awareness, the survey apparently offered a definition of the term – and after learning more about the cloud, more than two-thirds (68%) said they saw economic benefits in the cloud. The most commonly cited benefits were helping consumers lower costs (35%) and boosting customer engagement for businesses (35%), followed by spurring business growth (32%).
Different generations had different ideas about whether the cloud generates jobs, with 26% of younger Millenials citing job creation as a benefit, while only 19% of older Boomers chose that response.
“The most important takeaway from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favorably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives,” said De Carlis.
Image courtesy of flickr user JanneM.
