box.net - ReadWriteWeb

Box One-Ups Apple, Offers 50 GB Free Cloud Storage to iOS Users

John Paul Titlow — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:30:02 -0800

Twenty-four hours after Apple released iOS 5 and accompanying iCloud storage offering, Box has announced that they're offering iPad and iPhone users 50 gigabytes of free storage starting tonight. It's also increasing file upload limit from 25 MB to 100 MB.

To get that amount of storage from iCloud, users have to fork over $100 per year to Apple. Of course, one thing third parties like Box and Dropbox cannot provide is the seamless, cross-device syncing of things like contacts, calendars, reminders and Web bookmarks, nor can you easily use it to remotely back up your entire device in the cloud, as iCloud allows. Instead, Box has its own iOS app from which cloud-based files and folders can be managed.

]]> "The future of mobile is about being free of storage restrictions and closed systems," reads a post on the company's blog, in a not-so-thinly veiled dig at Apple.

More directly, the move can be seen as a shot across the bow against Dropbox, the popular, consumer-oriented file-sharing and backup service whose free plan stores up to 2 GB of data. For a 50 GB plan, Dropbox customers have to pay $10 per month, or they can double that storage for double the price.

Box's promotion is good for the next 50 days, but once redeemed, the data is good for life. To activate it, simply download the latest version of Box for iOS and log into (or create) your account.

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Study: Employees Will Find Ways to Route Around Corporate Firewalls

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:35:41 -0800

Earlier this week, we reported that a large number of businesses worry that social networking could endanger corporate security, but according to a new report from Palo Alto Networks, social networking is only a minor issue when compared to the proliferation of browser-based file sharing tools, P2P networks, remote desktop access applications, and more sophisticated encrypted tunneling applications like SSH, GPass, and Gbridge.

]]> Palo Alto Networks specializes in providing firewall solutions to enterprise customers, and this study is based on the behavior of nearly 900,000 users on 60 large corporate networks.

File Sharing

According to this study, users on 92% of the monitored networks used P2P software, with BitTorrent and Gnutella being the most often used services.

On 76% of the monitored networks, the company also found that users used browser-based file-sharing and cloud-storage tools like YouSendIt and MediaFire. According to Palo Alto Networks, tools like MegaUpload, docstoc, Box.net, and Zoho Writer might seem extremely useful to a user who wants to finish an important document at home, but these services also introduce a number of business risks, including a potential lack of compliance.

Employees Will Find Ways to Route Around Corporate Security

The study also found that users will go to great lengths to route around corporate networks and often use tools like Gbridge, encrypted tunneling applications, and various private and public proxy services to circumvent security protocols, corporate firewalls and filtering mechanisms. Companies are spending a lot of money on firewalls and filtering products, but in the end, users will always find a way around these.

The conclusion of this report is pretty straightforward: application developers are making it easy for users to negate corporate firewalls, and users are happily taking advantage of this, while corporate IT networks are constantly playing a cat and mouse game with these users. Palo Alto Networks is obviously in the business of selling better firewalls, so the company's recommendation to filter traffic not by ports, protocols, or IP addresses, but by application type, content, and user doesn't come as a surprise. Some users, however, will always find a way around these systems.

It is important to note, though, that this study also shows that there is clearly a large demand for these kinds of cloud-storage and browser-based file sharing services, and a lot of the risks detailed in this report could be managed rather easily by giving users access to a comparable set of approved tools.

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Box.net Updates Interface, Puts More Emphasis on Social Features

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:01:06 -0800

Box.net, the popular document hosting and sharing service, announced a major redesign of its user interface today, which also puts a lot more emphasis on social features like profiles and activity streams. The new version of Box.net also focuses on collaboration and effectively turns Box.net into a social network for small to medium-sized businesses and groups.

]]> While Box.net featured profile pages before, it now puts them at the center of the user experience. Your profile pages now show the latest updates from your network on Box.net. These activity streams now show you when a file has been uploaded, edited, or downloaded, which makes tracking the progress of a document on Box.net a lot easier. Box.net now also provides the ability to be notified of any updates in your activity stream by RSS or email.

In addition, you can post short text messages to your activity streams.

Box.net Is Now a Social Network

With this update, Box.net positions itself as a small social network for businesses. As Jen Grant, Box.net's VP of Marketing, explained to us, the reasoning behind this is that, according to Box.net, social networks work best when they are built around a certain type of content (like MySpace and music). Thanks to its integration with other online productivity services including Zoho, EchoSign, and Scribd, you could potentially run a large part of your business through Box.net and its affiliated services.

According to Box.net's press release, the company currently provides services to over 50.000 companies. As Jen Grant pointed out to us, these are usually small to medium-sized businesses, or groups within larger enterprises. The new features in Box.net will surely help the company to expand its business

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