You’re probably already familiar with what Dropbox is and how it is used; it’s undoubtedly one of the market leaders when it comes to personal cloud storage, and Dropbox does offer a premium service geared towards business users. That said, there are more than a few reasons why you should avoid using Dropbox, or any other consumer-grade cloud storage option, for your business, and here are just five.
- Possible Data Loss
Most consumer-grade cloud storage applications allow individual team members to very easily sync and share sensitive files, so the risk of losing your data or having it shared online increases by using one. When that happens, you may face fines and significant downtime, and it’s a situation that might happen through a mere accident.
- Potential Compliance Issues
Compliance regulations are becoming tougher all the time, with many now stipulating that files need to be stored for set times and access restricted to only a certain number of people. Unfortunately, you’ll generally find that consumer-grade cloud storage applications like Dropbox only offer minimalfile retention and access management.
- Lack of Control
One of the great things about looking into a personal cloud is that you’ll have access to detailed reports and receive instant alerts if anything goes wrong, or at least your IT support service will. This isn’t the case with consumer-grade applications; your admins will not have anywhere near that level of control or visibility.
- Chance of Corruption
Business-grade cloud applications tag every piece of data entrusted to them before storing it across multiple data racks. This eliminates the risk of silent data corruption, which recent studies show is observed in 1/1500 files, considering the number of files carried by even a smaller business, that’s actually quite a scary figure.
- Lack of Tracking and Monitoring
Your IT security admins cannot simply go onto Dropbox and see exactly when users accessed certain data. This isn’t always going to be a problem, but it will mean that your security team will be markedly less able to catch threats before they become serious.
