DropBox goes to the office

DrobBox the cloud-based hard drive service with unlimited storage (for a price) offering convenient synchronization between all your devices. You get started with few free gigabytes to get you going and few extra gigabytes when you sign up a friend. It has quickly become the nightmare of IT departments around the world. The zero-barriers entry, ease of use, and ease of sharing files with colleagues, customers and friends makes DropBox the new Trojan horse of IT.

Once again, IT managers have lost another battle in control of the information in their departments. In the workplace people are demanding the functionality of file collaboration and IT is not responding to the call fast enough. It’s not their fault. It is actually quite difficult to build DropBox-like system within a company’s IT infrastructure. Sure, there are commercially available products but the cost and time required to implement them is just too high.

Never fear, IT departments because DropBox is now extending the olive branch (or let’s just say giving you an offer you can’t refuse) by providing the necessary application extensions to be well-behaved in the enterprise. DropBox convinced major corporate IT industry players to go along with their idea. IBM, Microsoft and Dell are extending the functionality of their products by enabling them to use DropBox as a storage medium.

This is a huge step for DropBox, considering Microsoft’s own ‘drive in the sky’ is a competitor. Thanks to the newly unveiled API (the interface, programmers use to integrate software) new application vendors are hopping on the DropBox bandwagon with their own solutions in droves.

So what is the lesson for IT managers? They need to accept the fact that they can’t build and control everything. It’s better to try to understand how people work and architect solutions which will support it. Cloud storage and file collaboration can be an acceptable solution but maintain the drive to educate people about security and information protection. Instead of managing everything, think more about empowering people. Start thinking about customer-centric IT.