Dropbox Takes The Cloud Wide

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Rick Robinson.

Dropbox now has 100 million users. Founder Drew Houston noted the benchmark in a blog post, and the company celebrated by giving away a gigabyte of storage space. The sheer number of users indicates that most of them are consumers, not businesses (and certainly not midsize firms).

All the same, this is significant news for the IT community at midsize firms. Cloud computing has gone mainstream, used by millions of people who may not even know that their data is "in the cloud." And some unknown–but probably significant–proportion of those 100 million users are using their personal cloud storage for business purposes. Convenient access to the cloud has spawned a whole added dimension to the "consumerization of IT" that has not drawn much attention. This has downsides relating to security and data management, but a big upside in terms of simplicity and flexibility…

Clouds For All

As Donna Tam reports at CNET, Dropbox founder Houston announced the benchmark milestone and related how the firm was founded. Houston was at a Boston train station when he realized that he had left his USB stick at home. If only his data were somewhere he could access while on the go…

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