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Ask HN: My company is now disallowing Dropbox...

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Re: Ask HN: My company is now disallowing Dropbox...

#11
post #7

There's a good reason: I would argue that Dropbox has questionable security practices (by that I mean look around their site and try to find an in-depth description of how then insure individual account security... it leaves me with many questions :-). Dropbox stores and manages the encryption keys on their servers and they don't let users specify their own encryption keys. If someone manages to break into their serv…

Security is not goal in itself, although many IT types seem to think it is. As you note in your second paragraph, it's a sliding scale, to be weighted against productivity etc.

Re: Ask HN: My company is now disallowing Dropbox...

#12

I think that if a startup made encryption and data security a priority and had the amount of funding it takes to break the enterprise market, they'd start to slowly (as usual in the enterprise space) make more headway and gain acceptance in this area. IT actually likes to offload things when they have a reasonable assurance of control. Tarsnap is a good starting point, but it's CLI, doesn't work on Windows, and isn't…

A different approach is to just get consumer acceptance and get into the enterprise via the backdoor. That's what Dropbox (and 37sigs etc) are doing.

Re: Ask HN: My company is now disallowing Dropbox...

#13
post #2

The reason that enterprises have IT departments is so that they can control everything in house. The saas model (dropbox and similar remotely hosted services) doesn't really fit here because it separates IT from the services that it is supposed to manage (think of the legal and security mess of spreading your company's data to a bunch of 3rd party services). Your best bet is to find some white-label/internal solution…

Really, your best bet is to route around them. I may be a techie but I have little respect for corporate IT, sorry. Instead of focusing on increasing productivity, they always seem to focus on increasing their control (in order to not loose their jobs), and to increase "security". They don't remind me of hackers, they remind me of airport scanners and laywers.
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