#dropbox usage

Calling all Dropbox users! Please help a monk out and take a quick 5-question survey on your Dropbox usage & file-sharing habits.  Good karma will be yours! 

We’ve been talking a lot on our blog lately about how CIOs and IT departments can manage Dropbox usage within their organization. We know that workplace usage can present some critical security risks unless proper safeguards are employed.

According to a recent report by the Ponemon Institute, The Risk of Regulated Data on Mobile Devices & In the Cloud, 77% of organizations do not provide secure document sharing/mobile access solutions for their employees. As a result, 85% of organizations use insecure file sharing tools such as DropBox, Box.net, YouSendIt, USB Drives, Plain-text E-mail attachments, and more.

 We love this latest infographic from Watchdox 

We roved a nearby office to ask about Dropbox usage among some of the employees. Here is what the CIO of a large Enterprise had to say about her usage of Dropbox, the biggest inhibitor from allowing use company-wide, and what she needs in order to consider using Dropbox at a corporate level.  

(SPOILER ALERT: stronger encryption as well as monitoring & tracking capabilities.)

WATCH NOW

We know this is true, because in an interview yesterday with ZDNet’s Rachel King, Dropbox Head of Business and Mobility Ilya Fushman stated that more than two million unique businesses and 95 percent of the Fortune 500 are using the service.

The good news is you can come out of hiding thanks to Dropbox’s more recent strategic moves to make it enterprise-enabled with Dropbox Business, and its ability to integrate with third party encryption technologies.  In the ZDNet article, Dropbox’s enterprise strategy: Be as ‘ubiquitous’ as possible, Mr. Fushman explained:

"IT needs to have an interface to help people," said Fushman. "That's the stuff we're focusing on now -- making products that makes IT happy."

The trick, Fushman suggested, is layering on the functionality without sacrificing the ease and simplicity of the cloud-based storage and collaboration platform.

"The benefit for IT is people already know how to use Dropbox. That's the question around enterprise software," Fushman posited, adding that the barrier of a required learning curve is "pretty much gone."

Thus, Dropbox's development team has been tacking on more security functions, in particular, to further accommodate IT wishes. This includes single sign-on capabilities as well as better auditing of accounts and what is shared.

There are numerous solutions on the market today to address IT’s need for secure sharing of documentation within the enterprise, but they are often cumbersome, and most importantly, not easily accessible on the fly. Not to mention these solutions do not foster collaboration with business partners and customers, as employees must rely on email; and/meaning once the doc is gone, it is gone. With Dropbox Business, team folders can be created, and files can be automatically shared with everyone in the folder. The best part, team administrators are the only ones who can create the team folder and unshare the folders contents—ultimately helping them manage user privileges. While not 100% there, it is a huge step for businesses. It’s a win-win; employees get to use Dropbox and don’t have to rely on email or heavy internal based applications (did someone say Sharepoint?), and IT gets to maintain visibility and control, all without breaking the (Drop)box.

We roved a nearby office to ask about Dropbox usage among some of the employees.  Here is what one Executive VP of WW Sales had to say about he uses Dropbox when he travels, what he is mindful about when using Dropbox, and what Dropbox could do to put some of his concerns around security to rest.

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SafeMonk took the streets to find out how people are using Dropbox.  Let's hear what they had to say.