Dropbox dives deeper into the enterprise

05.06.2015
Dropbox on Friday has beefed up its Dropbox for Business product as the organisation looks to greater inroads in the enterprise market.

The company is trying to woo corporates with updated administration features for the business version of the data storage and sharing service, launched last April, as it positions the product against Microsoft in this space.

New tiered admin roles enable companies to delegate responsibilities by assigning one of three distinct roles -- team, user management, and support -- to each admin, each with a different set of permissions. A team administrator can delegate the work of adding new members to a Dropbox for Business team or resetting their passwords.

A new enterprise installer also lets administrators automate the deployment of Dropbox for Business remotely to any Windows desktop machine, the company said.

Dropbox also said it strengthened security with a recent ISO 27018 certification. This includes guidelines on how the company guards personally identifiable information, and how it has made it easier for admins to require two-step verification for account access.

Finally, a new connector being released in limited beta offers Microsoft Active Directory integration. Dropbox is also extending the Dropbox for Business API for further integrations. Companies such as Adallom, CloudLock, Elastica, Mover, Netskope, and SkySync have begun building integrations with Dropbox for Business.

"What we are announcing here really help that broad enterprise adoption and moving Dropbox away from a consumer tool into an enterprise-class solution," Charlie Wood, ANZ country manager at Dropbox, told CIO.

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Wood said users are happy with the mechanics, governance and control of the Dropbox for Business platform and the way it is secured.

"We have an interesting security architecture where we break up the data from the metadata, it is physically stored in different places," he said. "It's always been the case that the end user is often the weakest link in the security chain.

"By adding the ability to enforce two-factor authentication, then you are going to move away from many of those phishing or password reuse attacks," he said.

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Data generated by Australian customers is stored at AWS data centres and Dropbox's own facilities in the United States.

Wood said the company had made ground here in Australia but declined to reveal how many customers it had secured since the business product launched last year.

The company has 100,000 enterprise customers worldwide including 95 per cent of the ASX100. Other customers in Australia include retailer, Gelato Messina; legal practice management software provider, Leap; and liquor distributor, Suntory.

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"Leap was interesting because they went through a bunch of acquisitions. They took on Dropbox for Business and were able to shut down their fileservers within 10 weeks," he said.

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(www.cio.com.au)

Byron Connolly

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