In some of the latest tech merger and acquisition news, cloud-sharing giant, Dropbox, announced an acquisition of key technology assets from Boxcryptor, a German-based cloud security platform. While financial info wasn’t disclosed, this deep investment from an industry leader like Dropbox signals a growing concern around data privacy and protection. Boxcryptor says Dropbox will use its proprietary IP to integrate natively into Dropbox, providing end-to-end encryption for its users.

Dropbox offers standard privacy and security protection from cyberattacks for its 700 million users, who generate the company $1.91 billion in revenue. However, Dropbox itself does have viewing access to information that is passed through its platform. An integration with Boxcryptor’s leading cloud encryption technology will offer a new standard of “zero knowledge” encryption, meaning the user is the only person who will have complete control and access over who sees their data and files.

Dropbox Acquires Boxcryptor To Bring End-to-End Encryption to Users

While it might not be mission-critical for the everyday consumer to share family photos, 84% of Americans are still concerned about how much data they give to tech companies and what businesses, in turn, do with their data. They’re willing to abandon platforms or websites that threaten their data privacy, and 64% of consumers believe the government should step in to regulate big tech’s use of data. As privacy becomes increasingly important to both the individual internet user and global enterprise giants, strong security protections like end-to-end encryption might become standard.

For medium and global enterprise organizations using Dropbox, however, this airtight encryption is incredibly important. Boxcryptor’s technology will ensure the data is protected during transport and confidential documents are safe in the cloud.

Founded in 2011, Boxcryptor protects data across a number of partners, including Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Sharepoint. Going forward, it plans to continue serving other cloud storage providers outside of just Dropbox, which has led to some confusion on the terms of the acquisition. For example, Dropbox will not acquire Boxcryptor’s customer data, and service for the other providers will continue to be based out of the German data centers.

Use cloudHQ’s Backup Dropbox to Google Drive

However, while this new gold standard of encryption is helpful for securing important data, files, and documents, it’s still incredibly important to proactively back up your data. In case of a cyberattack, you have the latest versions in an alternative platform. Ransomware attacks are increasingly common and expected to cost $265 billion in damages by 2030, and cybercriminals will hold your data until the company makes a payment.

You don’t want to get into one of these situations and have valuable data in the hands of criminals. Use cloudHQ’s Backup Dropbox to Google Drive to automatically sync the two cloud platforms. You can also use Sync and Backup to keep a local copy of your data on your own computer.

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