Dropbox, after dabbling with business-focused features for a while, now added a new feature for business called “single sign-on” that allows users to sign-in once into their corporate networks and automatically log in to all applications they use, including Dropbox.
Dropbox is also renaming its “Dropbox for Teams” service as “Dropbox for Business,” because the company is targeting large and small companies, says Sujay Jaswa, Vice President of business development at Dropbox.
“Opportunities have opened up to work with larger and larger businesses,” says Jaswa. “Based on our conversations with these customers, the most requested feature was single sign-on.”
Dropbox claims that it is in 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and 2 million unique businesses. Leveraging an existing authentication infrastructure, Dropbox will now add SSO capabilities to its Active Directory integration and is working with several partners to ease that integration.
“Active Directory is really core to IT architectures, security and compliance strategies,” said Kevin Egan, VP of sales, in an interview with InformationWeek. “It lies at the heart of security, so we’re going to make it a lot easier for customers to plug in to their existing Active Directory infrastructures, and leverage things like secure sign-on.”
According to Tido Carriero, the integration with Active Directory will enable companies to leverage work they have already done in terms of setting security and authentication policy.
“It’s good for the end user not to have another password to remember — they can just use what they’re familiar with. Sometimes it can be in an automatic fashion if that’s how the admin has set up the system,” Carriero said. “Admins can set up security policies depending on the nature of the data being stored, and they can do things like set password requirements, reset passwords as often as they’d like, set up two-factor authentication, set up other kinds of authentication — whatever they have decided on for their business.”
With a strong competition in the cloud-based storage space, the SSO integration with Active Directory is an important step forward in making Dropbox a corporate — not just a consumer — tool.
