Dropbox Gets Serious About Business

Cloud storage company Dropbox takes corporate use of its product to the next level with today’s rebranding announcement. The former Dropbox for Teams product has become Dropbox for Business, a move the business hopes better reflects the purpose of the paid, upgraded service.

With the name change comes powerful new features including identity management from five other providers (so users won’t need to sign into Dropbox specifically if they’re already logged in to one of the other supported services) and the ability to join a corporation’s internal active directory.

Pricing for the service begins at $795 per year for up to five user accounts. Adding a sixth user costs an extra $125 per year, while additional users beyond that get priced on a sliding scale roughly based on that per-user price.

Traditionally, the Teams product’s primary advantage over cheaper individual Dropbox accounts was central administration. An account assigned as the manager could do password resets for the other Dropbox users, place basic security restrictions on the shared folders created for the group, and remotely unlink a Dropbox. (If an employee or contractor using one of the Dropbox accounts was no longer working for the company, the Dropbox manager could order the cached contents of that user’s Dropbox files and folders to be wiped, preventing that person from retaining a copy of internal company documents and data.) With the majority of businesses using Dropbox also maintaining in-house servers, however, this meant the employee tasked with managing the Teams account had to manage file security for the Dropbox folders independently of the file security permissions already in place on the local network and server(s). The active directory support with Dropbox for Business unifies that security management, potentially making Dropbox more attractive as a relatively seamless addition to the infrastructure.

Even with these new additions, I don’t foresee many companies discontinuing the use of in-house file servers. Hard drive storage costs keep coming down and dedicated NAS solutions keep improving, making it inexpensive and relatively easy to store and share large quantities of data on a local network, where it’s quickly accessible. Dropbox and other cloud-hosted solutions suffer from a reliance on a dependable and reasonably fast internet connection. For too many of today’s businesses, that’s not a given, especially as internet usage for email, regular web surfing, downloading software updates, and other daily business functions use up most of the bandwidth in place. Internet access becomes even more spotty when one travels. (The hotel I’m writing this article from right now has a wireless connection that’s far too slow for uploading or downloading large files.)

Nonetheless, Dropbox shines as a business collaboration tool for a remote workforce. There’s no need for employees to connect to a local corporate network via VPN software and connect to the proper shared resources simply to view a document stored on the server. Dropbox makes it as easy as sharing a link via email. The company is on the right track focusing on ways to integrate the service as a flexible companion to traditional network and server architecture.