Toll Free: 877-379-8279File and Online Collaboration?
News / By Scott M. Lewis, President / CEO Winning Technologies Inc
News / By Scott M. Lewis, President / CEO Winning Technologies Inc
One of the most common conversations that I have with clients is in regards to online file sharing, online collaboration tools and what are the benefits and risks to using some of the common online tools. In most cases it comes back to the traditional questions of, what are you going to do with it? How are you going to manage it? What are the risks verse benefits to your business?
The first thing that you have to remember is that you are a business and your business has competitors, so when you are evaluating a solution you have to keep in mind the differences between a consumer based product and business based applications. We recently had a situation with a client that had employees who were using a common online file sharing system. When one of the team members went to work for a competing company it was later discovered that he was still able to access the area that had been setup and was downloading information in regards to bids they were working on. This is a great example of how your data can end up in the hands of your competitors and how employees working outside the processes of the company can put you at risk. Another example of the risks you face with online file sharing systems are we had a client who’s employees were backing up their hard drives to an online file sharing system, a couple of these employees were terminated and they simply downloaded the backups they had made to the file sharing system to their new employers system.
For the purpose of this article we are going to limit our comparison to a couple of the more popular file sharing sites Box and Dropbox. These two products although similar are different in their target markets. Box is primarily geared towards enterprise and corporate environments, where Dropbox is geared towards small businesses and individual consumers. Box has a more developed feature set as you would expect based on their target market with tools such as online workspaces, content management, group permissions and a much better administrative controls. Dropbox does have some nice features as well such as being able to sync folders on several devices and sharing folders over the internet, but its ability to create a meaningful workspace is limited.
When it comes to which one of these products is easier to use it would have to be Dropbox. However, that ease of use in the corporate world comes with some risk management responsibilities. There are no administration tools to configure, it is basically setting up which folders you want to share and that only takes a few minutes to complete. Box is not that much more difficult or time consuming to setup, but it does have the ability to setup administrative tools, user groups, permissions, which can take some time and thought to configure and test.
Performance with either one of these products is going to be dependent on your local bandwidth and the size of the files you are uploading or downloading, which is true with any cloud based product or service.
When it comes down to which of these products is going to serve your business from a workspace perspective, Box is a much better application. You can setup access permissions, groups, and with those permission levels you can assign a workspace. Box also has a much more advanced integration with other web based applications and local applications. The simpler model of Dropbox just does not allow for a high level of application integration.
Now for the most important aspect of these two models, security. Keep in mind you are running a business and your data is worth something to someone and you should protect it. Corporate data espionage is a multi-billion dollar a year business, so never assume your data is not worth protecting. When you are evaluating these products remember it is less about the ease of use or end user preference. It is about the company and insuring you and your employees are making decisions based on protecting your company. Each software takes a different approach to security; Box takes the approach of access control where Dropbox uses encryption. While Box uses encryption on transfer, that is encryption on the connection at download or upload not on the files themselves. However, with Box, if you sign up for the enterprise accounts you can encrypt files on the Box servers themselves. Dropbox uses Amazon S3 as its backend and does encrypt files as you transfer them and Dropbox and Amazon say that the administrators are only limited to viewing metadata on the files, there has been a recent report that is not as true as Dropbox would like you to believe. The best course of action regardless of the service you choose to use is to make sure that you are encrypting your data before you upload it.
So which one is best for your business, well that depends on you and your business. The main thing to remember is that if you are using computing resources outside of your control in the corporate world you are putting your organizational data at risk. There are options that you can deploy in-house that are cloud based that will allow you to manage and mitigate much of the risk with these two products, but that does not eliminate them as viable options for consideration. Like any technology it is something that has to be managed, it is something that you as a company need to have policies and procedures around what is going to be uploaded and who is going to monitor the data and the access. Remember, cloud computing is basically someone else’s server, so make sure that is where you want your data and corporate information to be stored.
