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Research from B2B research firm Clutch has revealed just over half (52%) of small businesses are using a cloud storage solution, with Dropbox the most popular and Apple the highest rated service.
According to the report, which polled 438 small business across the US and 744 full time employees, Dropbox was used by 53% of respondents, ahead of Google Drive (45%), Apple iCloud (34%) and Microsoft OneDrive (30%). Box, in comparison, was used by only 6% of respondents, indicating a preference towards consumer services. Apple’s cloud storage was given the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 62, ahead of Dropbox (54), Google Drive (50) and OneDrive (45).
Plenty of moves have been made in the storage space in recent weeks. Microsoft announced earlier in November that it was dropping its unlimited OneDrive plan, previously available to Office 365 subscribers, after the company admitted a small percentage of users were putting 75 terabytes of data into their accounts – more than 14,000 times the average. Dropbox continues to push itself towards the enterprise market, announcing enhancements to its Dropbox for Business product to include new account management tools and greater security at a recent event.
Yet these survey results show businesses are not as savvy as one might expect with storage. “Cloud storage has been around for a while, but there are still many people who do not know the full scope of what can be done with it,” said David Amaya, consultant at Cardinal Solutions.
“Security and compliance concerns hold many back from adopting the cloud – as small businesses become more aware of what is possible and how the cloud addresses these concerns, the number using the cloud will continue to increase,” he added.
Elsewhere, research from all-flash storage provider SolidFire has examined the state of storage in next-generation IT deployments and argues storage automation is ‘predominantly’ addressing immediate problems IT teams face – but more work can be done. VMware has the largest contingent of organisations using storage automation, while OpenStack and, increasingly, containerised solutions such as Docker, are ‘poised to be a disruptive force’.