Wow – did you see the news and here?
Public cloud providers are taking a hammering from industry behemoths Google and Amazon and are responding by – you guessed it – lowering their prices (Dropbox Pro will now provide 1TB of capacity for $9.99 a month, the same price as Google Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive).
We predicted this here , and here, and even here.
The fact is, for paying customers, free isn’t free. For public cloud companies like Box and Dropbox, all the “free” users and all the heavily discounted users do one (or two) of two things. Cause the companies to hemorrhage money and/or force the companies to get their profits from the heavy users (enterprise customers).
“These guys will drive prices to zero,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and chief executive of Box. “You do not want to wait for Google or Amazon to keep cutting prices on you. ‘Free’ is not a business model.”
Now, one might think that for most, cheap and/or free is great news for most customers and you know, it is. EXCEPT for those IT managers who will see an even great influx of employees using these incredibly insecure, non-private cloud systems for the company’s sensitive data. Well then, there’s a problem.
It’s not about price, it’s about privacy, security and control.
Well, of course it’s a little about price, and end user ease of use – otherwise Dropbox would never have come into being and we’d all be getting our data from Sharepoint and syncing our data with FTP. But for businesses – especially those in regulated industries or with privacy and security demands, it is more important than ever to use the tools you already have to control and store your data.
I mean wouldn’t it be great to use all that authentication, governance, tracking – and heck, even storage – you already have, give end users some great, intuitive access tools (web, desktop, iOS and Android) and give IT clarity of vision and control? Why not have all the good of the cloud, without the prying eyes?
Don’t let this race to the bottom impact your bottom line too!
