Continuing its efforts to increase its appeal to enterprise users, Dropbox announced this week that it is expanding its business-level service with new features in administration, security, and integration.
Dropbox has made several moves in recent months to boost Dropbox for Business, including certification with ISO 27018, a new standard for data security and privacy that mandates strict requirements for data handling and employee access control. In March, the company also added a commenting function that allows users to add feedback and comments to shared files, as well as new collaboration tools and workflows for teams working on shared Microsoft files.
Tiered Admin Roles and Two-Step Authentication
Two of the new features are geared toward improving administration for IT admins managing large deployments. Tiered admin roles allow teams to set up different levels of admin roles. For example, a team admin can delegate the work of adding new members to a Dropbox for Business team, or resetting their passwords.
Users will be able to select from one of three admin levels: team admins, who can set team-wide security and sharing permissions, create admins, and manage members; user management admins, who can address most team management tasks, including adding and removing team members, managing groups, and viewing a team’s activity feed; and support admins, who can manage passwords and basic account security, and create team-member activity logs.
The other administration feature is an enterprise installer that lets admins automate the deployment of Dropbox for Business remotely to any Windows desktop machine. The installer can be run silently from another, elevated process, and should make provisioning for large-scale deployments easier. Team admins will be able to run the installer for several team members at once. Another new feature allows admins to set up two-step verification procedures for their accounts more easily.
Expanded API
The company will also be expanding its API, with new capabilities for shared folders. According to Dropbox, several data migration and data loss prevention providers such as Adallom, CloudLock, Elastica, Mover, Netskope, and SkySync, have already begun building integrations to help admins take advantage of the new functionality. The company said the new feature is aimed at making it easier for IT departments to integrate Dropbox for Business into their existing systems.
“As organizations continue migrating to cloud apps like Dropbox, IT needs to have visibility and control over content stored in the cloud to ensure the security of sensitive business data,” said Rick Holden, VP of business development and alliances, Netskope.
Dropbox also announced that it will be integrating Dropbox for Business with Active Directory, an identity management service for companies. The Active Directory connector, now being released in beta to select customers, will simplify resource provisioning and accelerate deployment, the company said.
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