It is available in Austria, so it's certainly available in many other countries as well.If you are worried about losing pictures, then you should store them in more than one place, not just the iPad, iCloud, and backups. Ultimately these are all the same place, as updating one will eventually update the others.
I like Flickr. There are dozens of other cloud storage options. Google just started a Photos service that would do the job well enough. I'm not sure if it's available outside the U.S. yet.