Dropbox is getting help from Dell to convince enterprises to pick its hosted storage and file-sharing platform, and also to make it more secure.
Take advantage of enterprises' growing interest in and acceptance for personal cloud-based storage services, vendors like Dropbox have been partnering with large telecom operators and software vendors.
On Thursday, Dell announced that its global sales team will from now on sell the business edition of Dropbox. The news follows an announcement from Box, which focuses on SMBs and large enterprises, that it partnered with Australian operator Telstra and British mobile operator EE last week. Dropbox and Box are still new names for CIOs and working with larger partners gives them both a stamp of approval as well as a larger sales force.
Dell is combining Dropbox for Business with the Cloud Edition of its Data Protection suite to let employees use hosted storage at work while at the same time providing IT departments with more control.
The Cloud Edition was announced in March, and offers features such as encryption, usage monitoring and the ability to create white lists of email addresses that users are allowed to use for file sharing. In addition to Dropbox, it is also compatible with Box and Microsoft's Skydrive.
This year, Dropbox has worked to improve its enterprise product. The company announced last month a new version that comes with the ability to better separate work-related and personal files and also allows administrators to remotely delete folders.
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