Michael Krigsman: Recommends Enterprises "discontinue use of" Dropbox

The article isn't referring to your "stuff", but is clearly directed at enterprise IT stakeholders. While the majority of the HN crowd may not find the opinion presented as applicable to them, it is a useful warning to enterprises that hold sensitive data. Unfortunately, the people who make enterprise IT policy are the last to learn about services (and its pitfalls) like Dropbox. So while HN may not be the best audience, I think its a bit dramatic and off-the-mark to demean the article as drivel.

What enterprise (and by that I mean a business with IT staff that wear khakis, have a cell phone holster, and call the business an enterprise) is ever going to use Dropbox? The question answered itself even before the authentication, um, issue.

Dropbox is a disruptive product. It's a product that the little guys discovered could help them be tremendously productive with their collaborators. If anyone is using it in an enterprise setting, it's without company sanction and is being done people outside IT who were told how to use it by their teenaged children. In the eyes of IT people, Dropbox falls in the same category as the labyrinthine Excel worksheets and Access applications: infections to be stamped out.

The reality is the these enterprises would fall over and cease working if all these unsupported-by- and despised-by-IT things did not exist. IT opposes anything they cannot control. They will spin elaborate scenarios where using one of these things will result in the failure of the corporation. They will bikeshed to death anything that does not bear their imprimatur. Dropbox represents a loss of control.

An IT person will for example object that DropBox doesn't allow IT to control who has access to data. What happens when we lay that person off? What happens if that person shares files with unauthorized third parties? What happens when…

All of this scaremongering occurs despite the reality any employee can walk into the office with an SD card or five and walk out with every bit of sensitive data they have access to. I had to deal with issues like this when I consulted for pharmaceutical companies. They had a staunch policy against cameras but then pretended to not notice that everyone's cell phone had a camera. They didn't allow people to have access to writable media but there are iPods-as-harddrives, thumb drives, and CD cards that they studiously avoided thinking about.

You're right: the author is an idiot, and his audience is other idiots more concerned with having a self-serving and self-aggrandizing opinion than having any real perspective on reality.