Consumer cloud storage ever-present in the enterprise

The approval for storage products akin to Dropbox is infiltrating into enterprise as users go against company policy to utilise cloud-based storage.

According to a contemporary report from social business network Spiceworks, 33% of organisations said that their staff was using personal storage products.

The report, entitled ‘The Cloud Barometer’, aims to present insight into SMEs and their usage of cloud-based file sharing software. Spiceworks interviewed over 300 users across North America and the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) region.

The IT industry appears to have a mixed view in this acceleration, with 31% of businesses surveyed agreeing that employees could use any provider they wished, yet 32% discouraged the behaviour.

Spiceworks noted that despite the accessibility, collaboration and convenience related to cloud-based storage software, employers were still wary of the dangers linked to file-sharing; evidently the kind of data being shared and the standard bedbug, security .

Regarding specifics, employees gave the impression to prefer Dropbox for his or her storage – 87% of these surveyed used it; however, only 28% of vendors preferred Dropbox.

“Vendors have to find the appropriate solution that addresses companies’ concerns around security, compliance and reliability while giving them what they need: complete accessibility, collaboration and coffee cost,” the report said.

Elsewhere, cloud-based email services are gaining but still lack behind on-premise, in keeping with Spiceworks. From the response of 262 IT specialists, 52% use on-premise email, 42% go hosted while the rest plans to head to a hosted solution within six months.

Predictably, reliability is the largest draw for any email employer, and naturally the cloud hasn’t had the simplest run in that department of late.

24/7 uptime is agreed because the primary consideration for 3 quarters of respondents, with security meeting company standards (46%) and price per user (40%) completing the head three.

Yet it is not all been excellent news.

Dropbox put the blame on a up to date security leak on an unnamed employee who reused his or her Dropbox password to a 3rd party website which was later hacked into.

According to a Dropbox blog post, security is being ramped up with two-way authentication and automatic mechanisms to identify suspicious activity within the pipeline.

“Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign right into a small choice of Dropbox accounts,” wrote Aditya Agarwal.

The Spiceworks report concludes: “Cloud-based applications consisting of file sharing, email and productivity suites are proving tremendously adept at producing the tangible results desired by business, particularly by small to medium businesses and midmarket companies”.

But what do you suspect? Is that this research more proof of the proliferation of the cloud?

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