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May 7, 2012 By Sarah Rich
As cloud storage multiplies faster than a YouTube viral video, government officials may be wondering which service is best suited for their organization’s needs — as far as pricing and features. Although there are a plethora of file storage services, three products in particular have garnered much attention recently from the IT world: Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
They essentially provide a similar service: file storage hosted in a cloud that can be synced to multiple devices, with the perk of receiving a few extra gigabytes of free storage upon signing up. Each of the three comes with unique pricing options.
Dropbox
Offers 2 GB of free storage upon signup and has individual pricing as well as group pricing available. For “team” pricing, the first five users to sign up for the service collectively receive 1,000 GB of storage, with 200 GB added for each additional user. The service is currently available for Windows, Mac, Linux and the major mobile operating systems.
Team price: $795/year for five users (1,000 GB)
Individual price: $199/year (100 GB)
Google Drive
Offers 5 GB of free storage upon signup. The offering is currently available for Windows, Macs, Androids and will soon be available on iPhones and iPads.
Price: $60/year (100 GB)
Microsoft SkyDrive
What may be considered the most attractive option in terms of cost, Microsoft SkyDrive offers 7 GB of storage upon signup and costs less than both Dropbox and Google Drive. The service can operate on Windows, Windows Phone, Mac, iPads and iPhones.
Price: $50/year (100 GB)
What GovTech.com Readers UseAccording to an unscientific online poll conducted by Government Technology, a majority of respondents said they don’t yet use a cloud sync storage offering work-related purposes. When asked, “Which of the following cloud sync storage solutions do you use most often for work-related purposes?” the results as of Monday afternoon, May 7, were as follows:
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Before selecting one of the three cloud offerings, it’s important for government agencies to know their security requirements, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst for advisory firm Enderle Group. They need to ensure that if they’re audited, the cloud offering they choose can meet the audit’s conditions.
But if agencies are only looking to use cloud file storage for publicly available information, any one of the three services should be a viable option for government agencies, Enderle said. However, for secured information that’s often confidential, it may be possible that none of the three cloud services should be adopted for an agency.
“So the first step is to determine what the security requirements are on the data that they plan to put into one of these services, and then make sure the services can actually be made to comply with those requirements,” Enderle said.
Governments also shouldn’t be overly tempted by the few free gigabytes of storage. “[Agencies] shouldn’t go and grab a chunk of free storage, especially if they are going to be storing government information,” said Shawn McCarthy, an IDC Government Insights research analyst.
The city of Fraser, Mich., is currently considering the adoption of a file storage and syncing cloud service for public city data. Earlier this year, the city initiated a technology advisory commission to provide the City Council with recommendations on IT practices, which includes helping the city work to overhaul its official website.
“What we want to do is put documents that are public domain so that we have a central repository for things that we can then link to the [official city] website; they’re readily available; they’re in a single spot and they’re always in the same place,” said Michael Lesich, a city resident who volunteered to serve on the commission.
As of now, the city has no plans to store private city data in a file storage cloud service because the city would like to ensure those records are protected according to their sensitivity. For now, only data in the public domain, such as recorded minutes from City Council meetings, is under consideration for the cloud storage.
Which cloud storage solution a government chooses likely depends on individual needs.
Lesich said of the three cloud offerings, Dropbox may be at a distinct disadvantage for Fraser’s government because it’s a stand-alone service. But Enderle said a stand-alone product like Dropbox could also be construed as advantageous. Because Dropbox doesn’t have additional features, there’s less of a chance that an outside user or malicious software (like a bot) could harvest data from the system without permission, Enderle said.
Google’s and Microsoft’s additional features, aside from file storage space, might be more appealing, Lesich said. But it’s not a slam dunk. Lesich said he feels that Google Docs are not user friendly — an opinion that could influence his final recommendation to the City Council.
Enderle said government agencies should also look at redundancy. In the event of a cloud outage, it’s important to have a redundancy program so services can still operate.
“Whether or not there’s a backup process in place, if they do have problems with their stuff, you’re not left wondering where your data went,” Enderle said.
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Agreeing with Enderle: for government organizations the security question is non-trivial. Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive are intended for consumer use—not business/government use—and so they all lack the necessary security and auditing features that government organizations require for sensitive information. Companies like Huddle and Box are better suited and Huddle is used by the UK Central government.
The idea of using Online Backup (Offsite data storage) is a great one however we should always remember different entities should comply with different laws at least in the USA. For example health related businesses should comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). none of the services you mentioned has this feature so at least health related organizations and business (Medical, dental, nursing offices, hospitals, and insurance companies) cannot use these services. There is a trend to provide highly secure and HIPAA compliant services which essentially prevents some of the features that dropbox and others are offering however the sensitivity of the hosted data is much more for medical records. There are quite a few of them out there offering this feature such as SecureOnlineVault or SOSonlinebackup, etc.
The securiy concerns render all services unlikely candidates for government agencies for file STORAGE; however, they all make great FTP sites for the public to deposit and pick up information that cannot be sent via e-mail due to size and other mailing restrictions.
This is also what we found for our Municipality. We finally approved Box.com for these reasons. We are usually able to accept the security. It's the managability and accessibility for things like investigations and public information requests that can pose a problem. Some vendors also use the data for marketing and other reasons and that poses a problem for sensitive data that a user may upload. The details of the terms for use of our data are usually a deal killer.
Thank you for the comments. I'm mentioned in the article, and I agree wholeheartedly with the security concerns mentioned by each of you. Cloud computing offers many advantages such as cost savings and convenience - for the right kind of data. Currently our public file storage consists of uploading documents, such as council meeting minutes and agendas to the city website. This process is cumbersome and not user friendly. Documents are stored in a proprietary file-naming convention and are indecipherable, making revisions and updates difficult to manage. We are at an early stage in our review of possible solutions, and I will take a look at Huddle and Box. Thanks again!
The security issues should always be considered if you are handling sensitive data. I would recommended storing all sensitive files in your data center instead on a cloud and at the same time get the power of such sharing and collaboration solutions. One good example is SyncBlaze which offers deployment options: cloud or on-premise.
You should also considering looking at SyncBlaze.
Thanks Terry, I will.
Can someone please detail what the "security issues" are? This is like saying, "They said....." I think cloud service providers (CVS)are more secure (physically) and most offer the same or better data security. So what are the security issues?
Security issues for me aren't necessarily physical in nature, but the possibility of unauthorized write/delete/admin access to the cloud storage area. This doesn't necessarily imply a flaw in the provider's service. It can and more likely would be caused by not setting user permissions properly, or not being persistent in monitoring and managing user access on an ongoing basis.
Almost all of the SaaS applications, like Box and Dropbox, are user provisioned and any mistakes would be made by the user/owner - not by the service provider. The most common security mistakes would also be made with an on-premise system. I'm not trying to defend a cloud system, just trying to understand what the "Security Issues" are.
Our IT blocks access to all cloud (web based) storage.
For a real enterprise solution that many governments and large enterprise corporations use already... try Microsoft Azure. VERY affordable vs alternatives and meets enterprise class requirements. Microsoft even partners with folks like StorSimple and CommVault to extend the storage offerings further.
Better read the erms of service before signing up for any of these. Google will crawl the content in order to target you with ads and they takes ownership of it. Dropbox will give your files to the authorities if they just ask for them. Another thing to consider is whether data/files are encrypted in the cloud and who owns or has access to the encryption keys. There are a number of ISV's coming out with complementary apps which encrypt documents before they go up to the cloud. It's a lot more complicated than just picking who gives you the most storage and how much each costs, as others have pointed out.
I agree with user provisioning being the weakest link in the security plan, just like they often are in on-premise system. As for SaaS providers never making a mistake - we can only hope. We've seen breaches, outages and failures before in all kinds of systems, online and internal.