Captain America (Dropbox)
Dropbox is near and dear to a lot of us because it truly was our first “hero” in the personal cloud space. Launched by two MIT graduates, it was Dropbox’s simplicity and functionality that propelled its success, capturing 50 million users as of October, 2011.  Like it’s Marvel counterpart, DB has been tried and tested and has emerged as the traditional product that users can depend on. Although only launched four years ago, it is astutely in touch with user sentiment and has paved the way for other newer cloud storage services.

Superpower Repertoire:

Free storage: 2 GB (up to 18GB with referrals)

Compatibility: Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, Web

Robust mobile apps: iPhone/Android/Blackberry

No desktop client file upload size limit

SSL AES-256 bit encryption

Kryptonite:

Security privacy: user data can be accessed by Dropbox employees (under legal implications)

Expensive (4x more than Drive for 100 GB)

Limited default storage

Paid storage is the most expensive of the bunch

No shared folders with permissions and password

Superpower Repertoire:
Free storage: 5 GB
Compatibility: Windows, OS X, iOS, Web
Automatic backup for iOS devices

Kryptonite:

File type and size restrictions; free limit: 25 MB, paid limit: 250 MB

Expensive (2x more than Drive for 100 GB)

Caters to Apple products

Superpower Repertoire:

Free storage: 7 GB (up to 25 GB for old users)

Compatibility: Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Web

Integration with Microsoft Office

Inexpensive (cheapest of the bunch)

SSL

Collaborative document editing

Kryptonite

Max file size: 2 GB

No Mac client

Superpower repertoire:

Free storage: 5 GB

Compatibility: Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, Web

Integration with your Google account

Max file size: 10 GB

Inexpensive extra storage

Deep search capabilities

Image recognition

Paid account = 25 extra GB storage for Gmail

Collaborative document editing

Kryptonite:

New, first generation product

So who prevails?

It’s hard to say. Each of these superhero solutions has its strengths and weaknesses.  And ultimately it comes down to who your adversary is.  Is it time and budget?  Security and privacy? Lack of integration?  Lack of collaboration?  And we can’t forget the importance of sidekicks.  But if we had to put our money on someone, it’d have to be on the green giant, Google.  With its array of resources, expertise in data management and commitment to the cloud, Google has the potential to wipe out any of its competitors.

*Throwback alert*

Sources:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/cloud-storage-a-pricing-and-feature-guide-for-consumers/
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/google-drive-vs-the-competition-dropbox-skydrive-icloud/
http://www.businessinsider.com/fight-dropbox-vs-google-drive-2012-5#
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services#Comparison

Join us on Wednesday, May 30th at 1:30 PM for our next technical overview webinar. This regular webinar series gives an overview of CloudLock, introduces new features, and allows time for a question and answer period for attendees.

Agenda (30 Minutes)

• CloudLock Overview
• New Features
  • Policy Engine Notifications
  • Groups Support
• Q&A

Our first post on the CloudLock Bostinno channel is now live. A version of the same post is below.

Last week we were doing a feedback call with a customer (who will remain nameless for soon to be obvious reasons), when he told us:

“I just used your product to expel a student. Since we’re a school, there are very few occasions when an outsider should share documents with our students. So I set up a policy to alert me whenever a document is shared with students. Turns out a student was using his gmail account to share dirty pictures with his school account, and he was sharing them with his friends.”

We can honestly say that we hadn’t anticipated this use case when developing our product. Sorry kid.

But it got us thinking. And after a little bit of research, we learned that Google Docs has some pretty sophisticated image recognition capabilities. An example:

This is a photo of a golden delicious apple:

If I upload it to Google Docs as 1234.jpg, I can search the following terms, and it comes up in my docs list:

• Apple
• Delicious
• Golden Delicious
• Golden Delicious Apple

Most K-12 schools wouldn’t object to photographs of apples in their Google Apps domain. But substitute the apple for whatever objectionable term that’s in your head right now. Then start thinking of other search terms that would lead to that image.

With CloudLock, you can create a list of terms that would identify images and content that are inappropriate for student documents, turn that into a policy, and get alerts whenever content matching the policy is discovered.

But how often do students share inappropriate content in their Google Apps for K-12 accounts?

The answer: All the time.

When we designed CloudLock, we aimed at Data Loss Prevention use cases that allow organizations to protect IP, and fulfill compliance requirements. What this customer taught us is a completely new way of using CloudLock: protecting schools from students storing content that could get the school in trouble. In this case it was pornographic content, but you can easily see the need to enforce policies around bullying, cheating, and plagiarism.

Which brings me back to the bigger point. Everyone tells you to listen to your customer, and every company will say how important customer feedback is to their business. But if you really listen, ask the right questions, and get to know how your customers use your product, you’re sure to learn something you would have never thought of.

And if you’re a student at a K-12 school that uses Google Apps for Education, you might want to keep your NSFW stuff somewhere else.

We’ve just added two new “How To” guides for K-12 schools using Google Apps for education. These are short guides that show Google Apps for K-12 Administrators how to effectively monitor and take action on student data in Google Docs, Drive, and Sites.

1. How To Report on Collaboration and Adoption of Google Apps in K-12 Schools
   K-12 schools piloting or moving to Google Apps for Education need to understand adoption of the online productivity and collaboration suite, and need to understand how students and teachers are collaborating.
2. How To Effectively Monitor Student Documents in Google Docs, Sites, and Google Drive
   Google Apps for Education Administrators need the ability to gain “view” access to student documents in a non-disruptive way. Currently, the administrator must change the student’s password and log in as that student. This approach is manual and time consuming, and results in multiple password changes for each incident.

Both are also available as PDFs:

We’ve written a lot about what Google Drive means to companies. Now we have a video. Watch the video below as Eric Chaves shows:

• How to enable Google Drive in your domain
• How to download and install Google Drive on an end user’s computer
• How to sync files and folders using Google Drive
• How to secure corporate data in Google Drive

Well this is cool.

I was just editing a Google Doc, and saw a sidebar I’ve never seen before. Found under Tools > Research, Google has just launched a research tool, which lets you search, insert images, quotes, maps, links, and citations from within a Google Doc.

And while this may seem like a convenience that only saves a few clicks, this new feature is huge for:

• Students at schools using Google Apps that need to write papers
• Companies that use Google Docs heavily, and are constantly adding images and links to Docs
• Anyone that wants to include a Google Map in a Document.

Click on the following image to see a few of the new features.

When talking with companies looking to move to the cloud for collaboration, they often tell us that they are considering multiple solutions. Though there are many products/services that allow customers to share and synchronize files, none provide the DLP and enterprise-class security features found in the combination of Google Apps and CloudLock.

Click on the following image to see the comparison:

We just found out that CloudLock is nominated in TechCocktail’s “Who’s Boston’s Hottest Startup?” poll.

From the site:

The winner of the poll will get an opportunity to tell their story on stage at our May 14th event – Tech Cocktail Sessions Boston. Now, time to vote!

We’ve been writing a lot about Google Drive lately, and we’ve decide to package everything together in one convenient PDF called “Securing Data in Google Drive: The Enterprise Guide to Keeping Corporate Data Safe in Google Drive.”

The guide includes the following:

• What Does Google Drive Mean to Businesses?
• How To Enable Google Drive for Your Domain
• How To Install and Sync Folders on End-users’ Computers
• How To Secure Data Stored in Google Drive
• Best Practices for Protecting IP in Google Drive
• How To Protect IP in Google Drive

Get the PDF here.

What do a parachuter, digger, guard dog, astronaut, and partier all have in common? Find out in this interactive infographic!

A shift in an established paradigm is always daunting.  The Cloud represents a whole new plane for data storage.  Previous standards and security practices that worked well to safeguard on-premise data, much to the anguish of Cloud users, simply can’t be tacked onto the Cloud. The DLP solutions of past undermine the entire essence of the Cloud: collaboration.  We’ve used various analogies in the past to capture this, but this time around we’ve focused on two key comparisons to environments that most everyone has interacted with; the home and the party.