Published on the 16/04/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Claiming its system is already used by 95 percent of Australia’s top 100 listed companies Dropbox has opened an office in Sydney – but has no plans to offer local data hosting…
Australia may boast one of the world’s highest per capita usage rates of Dropbox according to the company – but local users shouldn’t expect local hosting anytime soon.
Ross Piper, vice president of enterprise strategy at Dropbox, was in Sydney this week to announce the establishment of a local office – Dropbox’s first foray into Asia Pacific. With local high profile users such as Macquarie, Mirvac and Atlassian, Dropbox has been widely accepted by personal and business users alike – but all the important metadata stored in Dropbox will continue to be stored on Dropbox’s own US data centres, while Amazon Web Services will host other data.
And while there’s a local office, Dropbox hasn’t invested much thought in local marketing. Asked this week how much the newly released Dropbox for Business service would cost in Australia, Piper could only quote US pricing of $US125 per user per year.
The company claims 275 million people use the system today. Having started as a shared document storage system, Dropbox’s range has since expanded to allow shared access to email, photo sharing with the new Carousel service, and with the release of a reworked Dropbox for Business tool more enterprise IT tools delivering greater rigour with regard to data governance, control and transparency.
It’s now possible for Dropbox users to have access to both personal and business Dropboxes on the same computer, but with enterprise administrators being able to see or wipe information held in a business Dropbox.
Piper also provided an update on Project Harmony which will, starting with Powerpoint, Word and Excel, deliver collaboration tools (essentially a pop-up chat window) within the Dropbox environment without the need to download any additional software. The company is hoping to release this function this calendar year.
While the new software tools seem slick and well thought through Dropbox has received flak this week over its failure to email those 275 million users about the need to reset their passwords because of a Heartbleed vulnerability. The company only made the recommendation in a company blog after it had patched its own systems and rotated its own encryption keys leaving users who don’t read its blogs blissfully unaware.
