Dropbox Beefs Up Enterprise Features

Dropbox emerged on the scene for both businesses and consumers as one of the earliest, most accessible services that takes advantage of cloud technology. According to reports, these days, Dropbox has remained under the radar, focusing more on product refinement than adding new features.

But on Thursday (June 4), reports said Dropbox launched a slew of new updates, all aimed at making itself more attractive to the business crowd, especially large enterprises. In addition to recent features that make Dropbox more compatible with Microsoft Office and an upgraded application programming interface to strengthen its integration with business operations, Dropbox reportedly unleashed several updates for big business.

Among them, reports said, is an option for tiered administrator accounts to provide a more customizable security option for companies and their managers. The company has also introduced new capabilities that work with Microsoft’s Active Directory, again with the purpose of strengthening administrative security as the feature authenticates and authorizes users and their activity.

Reports said that Dropbox’s latest efforts to attract bigger companies as opposed to SMEs hints at a shifting technique to remain profitable amid falling data storage and cloud service prices. Last August, Dropbox lowered its prices to remain competitive with rivals like Google Drive, reports noted.

While Dropbox remains popular with companies, the service still gains more traction among individual consumers. An estimated 300 million users use the data storage platform, but the number of paying business customers is about 100,000. Rob Baesman, who heads Dropbox For Business (DFB), highlighted that more accurately about 4 million businesses use Dropbox in some form, including its free version.

Focusing on large corporations may be a smart move for Dropbox as research emerges that while SMEs are interested in cloud computing technology, they are more weary of cloud security and data protection.