Dropbox Boosts Admin Security Tools And Adds New Data Locations

Dropbox is continuing to boost the security and reliability of its cloud content sharing service as it seeks to gain a greater share of the lucrative business market.

The company is adding a number of new visibility and management tools for admins and also expanding is infrastructure network across Europe, Asia and North America to improve the performance of its platform and allow for data residency requirements.

Traditionally seen as a consumer file sharing service, Dropbox is investing heavily on the business side of the market and believes ease of use is what will allow it to compete with the likes of Box. To this end, it is overhauling its back end systems so they are as intuitive as the front-facing product with the AdminX initiative, which started in July.

Security tools

In the first major update to AdminX, Dropbox will give administrators the ability to block personal accounts while still permitting business logins and subdomain verification so IT managers can selectively deploy Dropbox to certain groups.

They will also have greater control over device verification and in the next few weeks will have more powerful auditing tools directly from within the administrator console. There, users can search for more than 350 activities by name, type and date to investigate and resolve incidents.

Dropbox Paper, the firm’s collaborative document tool, is currently in beta and those participating will be able to gain greater visibility to user activity, delete or suspend a user and transfer accounts.

“It’s often challenging for businesses to balance between facilitating easy collaboration and safeguarding company data,” said Rob Baesman, head of product for Dropbox Pro, Business and Enterprise.

“Traditionally, enterprise solutions have come at the expense of simplicity and great design. At Dropbox, we see an opportunity to eliminate these trade-offs by applying our ‘user-first’ design approach to reimagine and improve the IT admin experience.”

Trust goals

Dropbox has also signed up Symantec to its partner programme which already includes more than 30 vendors including Cisco, HPE, IBM, Microsoft and VMware among others.

“By partnering with best-in-class security providers, Dropbox helps CIOs extend their security framework to their Dropbox environment and increase their ROI by leveraging existing IT investments,” added Michael Shaffer, Vice President of Business Development at Dropbox.

But its not just security that keeps many firms from moving to the cloud, it’s privacy too. Dropbox has already received Privacy Shield certification for EU-US data transfers and lets customers store data in Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres if they need to do so for regulatory reasons.

And now it has expanded its infrastructure to 11 regions  – California, Washington, Texas, Virginia, New York, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK. This, the firm says should improve “industry leading” transfer speeds up to three times faster than before.

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