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As a customer of Dropbox for Business, I can confidently say they have a long, difficult road ahead of them here. The way they've defined their concepts seems h
by awakeasleep 13y ago
As a customer of Dropbox for Business, I can confidently say they have a long, difficult road ahead of them here. The way they've defined their concepts seems hostile to the very things businesses need in a product.
Even being a company that spends 50k a year gets you next to nothing wrt feature requests or support outside of what would be given to a free user, aside from speed of reply. If you want any level of control over data and sharing, you're sent over to "sookasa", a shambles of a business, or you can look at non-recommended solutions like boxcryptor (an incredible product that unfortunately carries it's own administrative overhead).
If anyone from Dropbox is reading this, the things that make my life the hardest are:
1) removing shared folders from a user's account. (Impossible unless your IT department controls every shared folder in your organization. Difficult & time consuming if they do)
2) Deleting a corporate account from all devices, removing folders. (Impossible)
3) Offering any sort of encryption (need to use 3rd party, unreliable)
4) Managing/reverting changes. Terribly ugly, difficult, and time consuming process. It's bafflingly inefficient, and in an organization of any size clueless or new hires are going to create these problems on a weekly basis.
5) Management and reporting APIs don't exist.
- marknutter 13y agoI work on a product that solves most of these issues you mentioned. Shoot me an email at marknutter at gmail dot com if you are interested in hearing more.
- prostoalex 13y agobox.com?
- wwwong 13y agoKeep your eye out for upcoming updates to Dropbox for Business. Looks like upcoming features will cover most of your points: https://www.dropbox.com/business/two-dropboxes https://www.dropbox.com/business/two-dropboxes
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- awakeasleep 13y agoWe'll see. The only thing that actually looks new is "sharing audit log" and an audit log is a long way off from being able to effectively control sharing. Changing someone's password to log into their dropbox, delegate ownership of the folder to a shared account helpdesk controls, and then have helpdesk go through every shared folder to remove a terminated employee, then sending the original user a password reset, then requiring a helpdesk touch for every sharing change in the future isn't a valid business workflow. Furthermore, in the past Dropbox's audit logs have been paginated lists you click through online. Not the sort of thing you can automate. Here's hoping for a change. Also, notice the phrasing: "With separate Dropboxes for personal and work, administrators can have the control necessary to secure company data, and you can still have your most important stuff at your fingertips." That sounds suspiciously like a sentence that says nothing at all, considering it's already easy to run two dropboxes, and all the problems I listed concern fully administered business accounts. Remote wipe will be nice though.
- brubaker 13y agoAlso I would add a simple: "Login as user xyz"
- gwbas1c 13y agoI'm the desktop client lead for Syncplicity. We are an enterprise file synchronization solution. EMC bought us in 2012. 1) Not only do we let you remove shared folders from a user's account, I designed our remote wipe feature that can go and delete those files from users computers. (It's a best-effort approach.) 2) We also support remote wipe from devices as well. 3) I'm not sure what kind of encryption you're looking for. In general, encryption with cloud storage introduces support difficulties, and makes it hard to do web-based access. We allow you to host your files on your own servers, so that might provide enough security to address your concerns. 4) We do allow reverting a folder to a known date, but you need to contact support. 5) Unfortunately, our APIs aren't public. Our management tools are in use at many large organizations, though.
- mcbain 13y agoI won't be the first to ask but: Linux client, please.
- Filecloud 13y agoI am dev in Tonido Filecloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com http://www.getfilecloud.com) We support all your requirements except 3: 1. Removing shared folders from a user account - admin user can remove the shared folder from a user account or move to a different account. 2. Remote Wipe - admin can block or remote wipe the sync folder not only in mobile apps but also in PCs. 3. Our product is self-hosted and runs on customer HW. Currently we don't support encryption on rest. Our next release will have that. 4. Reverting to earlier version - you can do this easily with our solution 5. We provide reporting and management APIs as well. Check it out and let us know ur feedback.
- bmw335 13y agoOur Tonido FileCloud supports all your requirements except 3: 1. Removing shared folders from a user account - admin user can remove the shared folder from a user account or move to a different account. 2. Remote Wipe - admin can block or remote wipe the sync folder not only in mobile apps but also in PCs. 3. Our product is self-hosted and runs on customer HW. Currently we don't support encryption at rest. Our next release will have that. 4. Reverting to earlier version - One can easily revert to previous version 5. We provide reporting and management APIs as well. Check it out and let us know ur feedback.
- rsync 13y agoJohn here, from rsync.net. We don't do any of the things you list - not even close - and we don't ever plan to. We can, however, do this: pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump" and this: ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe ... it's probably not for you. Cheers!
- VuongN 13y agoHi there, awakeasleep. I think all your points are very solid. I would, however, disagree with you about Dropbox or any other cloud provider implementing their own, in-house, encryption. They're the one with the data and having the key to open your data as well is, to me, a conflict of interest. I've share my thoughts on this a while back (http://vuongnguyen.com/personal-business-cloud-security.html http://vuongnguyen.com/personal-business-cloud-security.html). Now, if you haven't had a chance to use nCrypted Cloud, give us a try: http://ncryptedcloud.com http://ncryptedcloud.com. We do client-side encryption and work on top of Dropbox and shortly other cloud providers. We're free for regular consumer. The enterprise clients we have a usually more interested in the integration, management and control mechanisms we have in place. Thanks, -V. PS: Please feel free to contact me if I could be of any help. My email is in profile.
- jychang 13y agoI'm pretty amused that most of the responses to this comment is "I built a service competing with dropbox that does what you want!". It's interesting to see the changes in the market since when Dropbox pioneered it around 2007 or so.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoWhat you are asking for is the "management" of distributed unencrypted data - it's probably impossible, but likely a major rethink in how we distribute data.