Making life easier for IT: The new Dropbox Business
Over the past decade, the applications we use at work have gotten a lot more powerful. They’ve got more features and an ever-growing list of customization options. But all that growth has come at a cost. Today’s SaaS apps might be more capable, but they’re increasingly difficult to manage from the IT side. With confusing settings and needlessly complicated UI, many IT teams have way more work today than they did 10 years ago.
That’s why we’re making big changes to Dropbox Business, with new features designed to make IT leaders’ lives easier. We’re making team management simpler, giving you more tools for data security and compliance, and providing new insights based on your teams’ activity in Dropbox.
Simplify team management
Suppose you’re responsible for collaboration services at a large university system with several different colleges. Each college has its own IT department, and a preferred mix of tools to get work done. For example, some colleges use Google Docs, while others use Dropbox Paper. Some have deployed Dropbox Business already; others haven’t. What’s more, many of the colleges have faculty, staff, and students using similar services, but each group needs different security and settings configurations.
You’d like to bring all these groups into one ecosystem, but you still want to support each team’s specific needs—all without burying the IT team in extra work.
The new Dropbox Business can do that. Now, with the enterprise console, you can maintain high-level control and visibility while also delegating control where appropriate. As the enterprise admin, you can review and manage users across multiple Dropbox instances. See aggregated activity within a given deployment, browse team members, and adjust settings, all from one place. At the same time, you can delegate content and user setting controls to each team’s admin—and also set roles for each admin based on the level of access they should have.
Each team admin can go on to select the settings they prefer, all while complying with your organization-wide security standards. It’s the kind of work you might have spent your whole afternoon micromanaging—now delegated to your respective teams.
Ensure data security and compliance
Users have always counted on Dropbox to provide a unique combination of simplicity and security. It’s a service that’s simultaneously easy for anyone to use but built on a trusted platform to keep your data safe.
Today, we’ve taken a similar approach—prioritizing both ease-of-use and data safety—with new security tools, each specifically designed for team admins. First, Dropbox Business admins will now have added visibility through the enterprise console, with a comprehensive view of all teams, members, and activity, including all cloud content stored in your team’s Dropbox.
Second, admins can get access to more granular content controls in Dropbox with legal holds and extended version history—features rolling out in the coming months. Designed to help your team get a snapshot of the data in an account, these data governance tools let you retain file versions for up to 10 years. You’ll have more peace of mind knowing your data will remain organized, accessible, and searchable, even years after creation.
Third, we’ve rolled out local data storage to more regions globally, so team admins can easily meet their data residency needs. We’ve also made it easy to designate which region your team’s data should be stored in. These features give your team much more flexibility and control for meeting data compliance standards.
Finally, we’re partnering with BetterCloud to further enhance Dropbox Business admin tools. The integration will give IT teams even more tools for deploying, managing, and governing Dropbox at work, securely. Rolling out later this year, the integration will also include advanced data loss protection capabilities.
Take action with new insights
To keep your data as safe as possible, you need to make sure your employees are using their tools correctly. But monitoring employee behaviour can sometimes feel like looking out for a digital needle in a data haystack. To help make that job easier, Dropbox is rolling out a new activity page with a rich interface for searching, filtering, and reporting—including shortcuts to quickly take action for remediation.
What’s more, we’ll soon be launching a new dashboard that highlights high-priority user activity, so you can get a high-level view of your team’s activity from one place.
Try the new Dropbox Business
Many of the above tools are available to Dropbox Business customers today, with several more rolling out in the coming weeks. For a full breakdown of features—including both existing tools and new options—visit the Dropbox Business page below.
