Watch it, Box: Google pulls 1,800 businesses into Drive for Work every week

Since Google announced its business-focused flavor of Google Drive, Google Drive for Work, adoption has been swift, according to figures the company released today.

“Today, more than 1,800 businesses sign up for Drive for Work each week,” Scott Johnston, director of product management for Google Drive, wrote in a blog post. Customers of the service, which costs $10 per employee per month, include WeddingWire, Johnston wrote.

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Meanwhile Google is also touting its reliability. “Last year, Google Drive achieved 99.985 percent availability, which averages to less than 90 minutes of disruption per year (our SLA guarantees 99.9 percent),” Johnson wrote.

Such performance equates to a taunt to competitors that have had outages, including Dropbox. The market continues to heat up as prices fall and storage limits go up, and Google is one of the few companies that can push hard on price and scale because of how big it is and how much infrastructure it can buy in one shot.

Meanwhile Amazon recently entered the market, and Box has lowered prices. Microsoft represents an increasing threat in cloud storage, too, having recently bumped up OneDrive’s free storage limit to 15 GB and offered 1 TB to OneDrive for Business customers, not just 25 GB.

Even if Google might lack the buzz that IPO-bound Box and Dropbox have these days, Google is gunning hard for business credibility, not only in the file-sync-and-share business but also in the cloud infrastructure market. Consider yourselves warned, competitors.