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Dropbox bolsters enterprise play, engages in competitor bashing

(c)iStock.com/KIVILCIM PINAR

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has launched a new enterprise product, as well as making other announcements at an event in San Francisco.

For those asking the inevitable question of ‘doesn’t Dropbox already have an enterprise product?’, then the answer is yes – Dropbox for Business, which has more than 100,000 users – but this product enhances those features to include new account management tools for greater security.

Among these are a suspended user state option, which allows for greater flexibility when employees leave a company; the ability for team admins to log in to an employee’s account; as well as custom branding capabilities.

“With Dropbox Enterprise, IT can give employees the Dropbox they love while getting the advanced capabilities they need to effectively onboard and manage tens of thousands of users, protect company data, and get the most from their investment,” a company blog post read.

While the statistics associated with Dropbox are impressive – 4,000 edits to documents are made each second, with users syncing 1.2 billion files each day and creating more than 100,000 new shared folders and links each hour – the company continues, despite its best efforts, to trail an image of being more consumer-friendly in the media. This may have a point; research released this week from MobileIron revealed that Dropbox remained among the top banned apps by enterprises – providing precisely no change to figures Fiberlink released back in 2013.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston vehemently argued the case for his company during the event. According to WIRED, Houston mentioned a competitor – not by name, but by all accounts Box – and argued Dropbox had accrued more business customers across 10 months than Box had during its lifetime.

Other announcements the company made served to beef up its enterprise stake. Dropbox announced it now meets HIPAA and HITECH Act compliance obligations, helping customers that handle Protected Health Information (PHI). Elsewhere, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to become a premier reseller of Dropbox for Business products. The company officially launched earlier this month, with $53 billion in annual revenue.