As Dropbox and other cloud services become more common in the workplace, many companies have stepped up and created policies forbidding their use for any work-related material. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement has spread to many companies and these companies are beginning to see that many users are using Dropbox for work despite IT policies which might forbid using Dropbox to store work documents.

One out of five employees use Dropbox for work documents

According to a poll of 1,300 business users conducted by Nasuni, one out of every five users say that they use Dropbox to share work documents, even though this goes against the company policy which expressly forbids the use of Dropbox. One main reason is that there is a distinct shortage of good enterprise content collaboration platforms on the business level which means that most employees will go with Dropbox because most other enterprise content collaboration platforms are not as good and convenient. Employees have found that Dropbox is the best and easiest way to get the job done- other enterprise content collaboration platforms complex and are not easy to use on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Dropbox is simple to use, has a high availability and is very convenient as it can be used practically anywhere.

One interesting fact from the survey- the higher the person is in hierarchy, the more likely they are to use Dropbox for work documents.

Educate employees how to use Dropbox and use Dropbox for Team

The solution is not to ban Dropbox or implement company policies that forbid its use. IT should concentrate on making policies that clearly define the use of Dropbox for Teams in the corporate environment, as well as bringing security awareness to employees and educating them on the policies and the use of Dropbox as it pertains to the company. There are some industries that regulation will not allow the use of Dropbox, but even in these situations employees will have been educated and have a good knowledge of the company policies so they understand the regulations concerning the documents they manage.

Sync accounts with cloudHQ for consolidation and backup

However there is an interesting feature in the Dropbox for Teams app: If you get booted from the team everything is deleted: including your data created before you joined Dropbox for Teams. Check this post from Hacker News which details how the flaw is exploited.

But cloudHQ can help. First ensure that you have both a private and work Dropbox account. Then, cloudHQ can sync your private Dropbox account with a folder in your Dropbox for Teams account so even if you get removed from the team and your Dropbox for Teams account disappears, all of your files, folders and data will still be intact in your private Dropbox account.

Basically, you probably want to establish your sync like this:

Dropbox (private_account) <-> Dropbox (your team account)/Dropbox_private

Evernote (private_account) <-> Dropbox (your team account)/Dropbox_evernote

This will ensure that no matter what happens to your Dropbox for Teams account, whether it’s an accidental or wrongful deletion by Dropbox, or a malicious deletion by the team, your data remains secure in your private account.

CloudHQ is also the perfect way to sync other cloud services such as Evernote or Google Drive to Dropbox for Teams. CloudHQ has great functionality and can be used to integrate various Dropbox accounts, even private accounts.