One in five employees use Dropbox for work documents: report
We've all done it. Instead of emailing our work home using our corporate email accounts, we've banged those latest financials or that important contract in our Dropbox folder.
Unwise move, suggests a new report.
According to enterprise storage firm Nasuni (via GigaOm), one out of five of 1,300 surveyed business users say they use the consumer cloud-storage and synchronization service to share work documents, even though businesses and corporations disallow such a practice through their company's own IT policies.
Of all offenders, it's those towards the top of the corporate ladder, notably vice-presidents and directors, while C-level executives -- such as CEOs, CFOs, and likely CIOs themselves -- were found to have used the service to share and store documents outside their own corporate domain on their own bring-your-own-device (BYOD) tablets and smartphones.
The report findings are likely not new to experienced IT veterans. With more than 100 million people using Dropbox in the five years it has been up and running, it's also not a surprise that around one-fifth of all those surveyed are using Dropbox.
But it (almost) goes without saying, work documents stored in the cloud are vulnerable not only to your own government's law enforcement and intelligence services, but in some cases foreign governments also.
ZDNet's Charlie Osborne recently explained that 40 percent of respondents to a survey published earlier this month stated that security concerns were the top reason when using the cloud-storage service. Dropbox has suffered some small, albeit not insignificant hacking attempts and breaches in the past -- such as a case where some user accounts were open to all without a password, and another case where spam emails were sent to Dropbox users.
Since then, Dropbox has initiated two-step verification to further secure accounts, and also opened its first international office in Dublin, Ireland, in a bid to expand to European users.