[awakeasleep]

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.

[rsync]

John 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 [e-mail] "dd of=db_dump"

and this:

  ssh [e-mail] s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe

... it's probably not for you. Cheers!

[gwbas1c]

I'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]

I won't be the first to ask but: Linux client, please.

[noir_lord]

Seconded.

Dropbox will keep me as a customer purely because my entire business is run on Linux (except for the Mac my business partner uses).

[jychang]

I'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.

[rsync]

Exactly. I hope people recognize our response to the "my flybynightcloudstoragefirmbuiltonaws does just what you want" lineup was meant to be funny...

[tempestn]

The problem is when it gets upvoted above the other responses it just becomes confusing.

[VuongN]

Hi 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).

Now, if you haven't had a chance to use nCrypted Cloud, give us a try: 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.

[wwwong]

Keep 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

[awakeasleep]

We'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.

[marknutter]

I 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]

box.com?

[lifeisstillgood]

What 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.