Dropbox for Business?
Cloud storage technology has evolved to meet the planet’s insatiable need to retain vast amounts of information. In the market for consumer information storage, Dropbox has led the way, beating out Google Drive, Microsoft’s One Drive, and other solutions that jumped in to fill consumer demand. In addition to its core market of over 300 million consumers, Dropbox is also targeting companies ranging from small businesses to enterprise corporations with its evolving Dropbox for Business offering.
Dropbox is obviously popular with consumers and is great for most personal use. When it comes to the business world, however, there are several things to think about if you or your business is considering using Dropbox to store the business information you need to archive or that you use regularly. 2 of the most significant of the issues to consider when using Dropbox for business involve security and compliance.
Many professional services and medical business, including accountants, law firms, and doctor’s offices, are beholden to governance regulatory bodies and laws ranging from the IRS and its tax code to patient and client privacy laws such as HIPAA and FINRA. There is a distinct difference between the capability of Dropbox’s business product to simply store huge amounts of data while keeping it protected from hackers and the need for keeping that data at a level of access that is mandated by the respective governance bodies.
Dropbox for Business has made progress with security so that their offering is more acceptable to business, achieving ISO 27018 certification in early 2015. However, for businesses that require something beyond simply keeping their information free from data breaches, such as workflow, role-based permissions, and other security features, Dropbox for Business doesn’t cut it.
In addition to the security aspect of compliance is the consideration of how well a generic cloud solution like Dropbox facilitates compliance activities that include retrieval of a piece of information (e.g. in the case of an audit) and destruction of the information after the legal requirement for its existence expires. For instance, can you tell Dropbox for Business to automatically delete a W-2 document three years after a tax return was filed? If your business needs that kind of logic built into its document management solution, you’re probably going to need to look elsewhere.
What’s The Alternative to Dropbox for Business?
If you need a storage product that represents electronically the activities that occur naturally in the course of your business, such as storing, searching, and sharing documents and other pieces of data, you need to take a look at eFileCabinet. eFileCabinet’s online document management solution is built for technical and access-level security, including using 256-bit encryption, giving admins the ability to set up role-based permissions for users of the system.
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