Dropbox Adds Business Security And Collaboration Tools Ahead Of UK Office Opening

Dropbox for Business is set to receive new collaboration, security and developer tools as the company looks to open a new office in the UK to take advantage of strong take-up of its services by UK consumers and enterprises, particularly SMBs.

“One out of every four Internet users in the UK are using Dropbox,” says Johan Butting, Dropbox’s head of Europe. “That’s a super impressive number and makes the UK one of the most important markets for us.”

UK loves Dropbox

Major British customers include Spotify, Channel 4 and CBS Interactive, with UK users more mobile than their global and US counterparts.

Seventy percent of Dropbox’s 300 million users are based outside the US, with the service hosting one billion shared folders and links and 1TB of files saved daily. The number of users has grown by 200 percent in the past 18 months and there are 300,000 applications built on the platform.

The company says 80,000 businesses use Dropbox for Business, a figure it is hoping to increase by combining the ease of use that has attracted so many consumers, with “robust, powerful controls” that enterprises need.

New Features

Collaboration has been a key focus for Dropbox’s main rivals, such as Box and Google Drive, so Dropbox has beefed up its own features with Project Harmony, which lets users see who else has access to a shared folder and who is viewing and editing a document at the same time.

If another user makes any changes, a notification appears on the screen and provides the option to update the file accordingly. Fushman says this is evidence of how Dropbox fits into existing workflows on software like Microsoft Office, rather than imposing new kinds of methods, like Google Drive or Box Notes. Full text search will also be added as will a new document preview that displays office files and PDFS within Dropbox itself rather than open the related application.

Dropbox is also improving security by adding“view-only” options to shared Dropbox folders and expiry dates and passwords to shared links, in order to protect content that might need to be shared outside the company.

“We’re really talking about sharing,” says Ilya Fushman, head of product for Dropbox. “It’s fundamental to what people do in Dropbox.”

Security concerns

But Dropbox’s reputation for security and privacy has taken a bit of a hit recently. Edward Snowden told The Guardian that the firm was “hostile to privacy” and noted that Condoleeza Rice, “the most anti-piracy official” you can imagine was put on the company’s board. Snowden urged the public to use “zero-decryption” services, like Spideroaks, that encrypt files on the user’s device before they are sent to a cloud storage platform.

Fushman says user’s data is secure but warns client-side encryption would mean many of the features of Dropbox simply wouldn’t work.

“We are all users of Dropbox. Dropbox as a company runs on Dropbox. Security, privacy, all these things are top of mind for us,” he explains. “In terms of how your data is handled, it’s encrypted in transit and on our servers. We actually think encryption beyond that, client-side encryption, is really a user choice.

“We want to make sure we deliver the best-in-class experience and finding the right way to do that with encryption is something we continuously value. For example, it’s actually hard to do things like rich document rendering and sharing rich documents which are rendered if they’re client-side encrypted. Search is also hard to implement. We can’t index the contents of files.

“Finally we want to make sure that if someone does use client-side encryption, if they lose the password for that, we can’t help them recover their data.”

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