The Akron Legal News

Login | March 29, 2024

Cloud storage and transfer services updates

RICHARD WEINER
Law and Technology

Published: October 3, 2014

Cloud storage has come a long way in the last couple of years—from nonexistent in 2009, to dominant in 2014. With many (not all) security concerns being dealt with, it seems likely that many law offices, and certainly many businesses, are taking advantage of these services.

Here are some of the latest things happening in the field.

Not that every story about cloud storage is about Dropbox, but, with over 300 million users, that services makes waves whether it is leading or following a trend.

So it was some kind of news when Dropbox recently changed its premium/ power user pricing structure, even though it really only brought the storage company into the mainstream.

Storage prices have nosedived recently, with the cost of modern hard drives at about 3 cents per gigabyte, up from $20 or so in 2000.

In Dropbox’s old pricing system, users were billed charges upwards of $50 a month for 500 gigs of storage. The new price? Only $9.99 a month for one terabyte of storage, a price that covered only 100 gigs before. The result, says Buzzfeed, “effectively marks the final shift of Dropbox being a company centered around cloud storage, to a company that is centered around the software that sits on top of that storage.”

Within that framework, Dropbox has a cranked-up group of add-ons that are available to corporations for $15/month/user, a service that has attracted over 4 million corporations.

In addition to the pricing changes, other changes to the Dropbox platform include security updates, and time limits and other limits on file sharing, including remote wiping.

Dropbox has been pushed into this business model for a simple reason: everybody else is doing it.

For reference, here is a list of other cloud storage services and their pricing models, all monthly amounts for 1 TB of storage (thanks to Quartz):

MediaFire: $2.49

Bitcasa: $10

Google Drive: $9.99

Amazon Cloud Drive: $41.67

In addition, Apple’s iCloud offers up to 50 gigs for $100 per year (but has announced that a new pricing structure is coming), and Microsoft has One Drive personal accounts for $3.99/ month for 200 gigs.


[Back]