Over the past several months, Box has reinvented itself. The company went from being a pretty basic cloud storage solution to true enterprise solution and a hub for storing, viewing, and editing all manner of documents on an iPad or other mobile device. Box’s journey continued this week as the company launched a series of new features for business and enterprise customers.
Box has offered business/enterprise document storage and sharing for quite some time. This week, however, it unveiled a series of improvements to its enterprise offerings that give administrators a much broader range of document and information management. It also improved the overall user experience for enterprise customers.
The administrator and IT improvements include:
- More granular controls for setting access to files
- Mobile-specific security features like passcode locks
- Support for multiple email domains
- Archiving capabilities for activity notifications
A broader addition that applies to users as well as administrators and IT staffers is enterprise-wide search of all Box accounts associated with an organization. This should reduce the tendency of files to get trapped in different data silos – a common issue with public cloud services that can significantly limit collaboration. It should also address issues where a company needs to locate documents for managerial, financial, or legal reasons. Along those lines, the search functionality may even help prevent data leakage outside the enterprise into personal storage and data sprawl across multiple services or accounts.
These changes are momentous for many businesses, including those in some regulated industries, because they will close some data security and privacy compliance gaps.
In addition to the new features, Box also revamped its enterprise licensing agreement. The new agreement focuses on creating predictable costs to companies for situations where their needs and staffing levels change.
Source: TechCrunch
