eFolder’s Hulsy: Dropbox for Business Lacking

Sometimes being on top does nothing but give you grief from competitors hoping to flaunt your flaws. And when it comes to Dropbox, maybe some of that grief is deserved, but it also means everybody with a file sync and share cloud offering is taking aim and hoping to prove their services are better. And with the launch of Dropbox for Business, that competitive nature is coming out even more.

According to Ted Hulsy, vice president of Marketing at Dropbox competitor eFolder, which provides cloud data protection and file sync offerings, Dropbox for Business is still missing several features that enterprises really need.

Enterprises demand a more robust feature set, Hulsy wrote in his Wired "Innovation Insights" blog, and the distinction between Dropbox personal and business accounts is at best superficial. Sure, it's a fairly heavy criticism of Dropbox, but let's face it: The popular file sync and share service has suffered worse criticism. And the company has made strides to fix some of its more publicized issues.

But Hulsy had a list of features that Dropbox is still missing, including:

• The ability to host the storage solution on-site, on a local server and/or on a remote server.
• Complete file sharing policies for internal and external parties.
• Cloud enablement of a file server.
• IT management tool integration.
• HIPAA compliance.
• Bandwidth throttling and file type restriction.

Hulsy may have a point to make, but it also seems like a competitor trying to tear the leader in its space down.

"Even with business folder categorization and remote wipes, Dropbox for Business does not allow for the transparency or control that businesses need," Hulsy wrote. "Between the heightened risks of data theft, data loss, data leakage and possibility for compliance violations, Dropbox's 'consumer-grade-gone-business' service is simply not worth it."

Such criticisms haven't stopped businesses and individual end users from turning to Dropbox for their file sync and share needs, and it's unlikely they will scare off many customers in the future. Regardless of whether Dropbox is really a consumer cloud app that has been ported over to the business world, the company has gained quite the following and is making a business of what many competitors are struggling with.

Dropbox declined to comment on Hulsy's blog post.