Dropbox thinks it’s like the iPad: Unexpectedly infiltrating the workplace

Dropbox vice president Sujay Jaswa says people should think of Dropbox like the iPad: a technology that was aimed at consumers but wound up infiltrating the work world.

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“The idea that work will be done the same way five years from now is just impossible,” said Jaswa during the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “We have some awesome ideas that we will talk about in the next several months.”

He suggested that Apple probably thought of different use cases for the iPad but didn’t imagine customers would start taking them into work and schools, transforming the way we work. Bringing the analogy full circle, Dropbox has tablet-related announcements to come soon.

Currently, the company has 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies as clients, and according to research by firewall company Palo Alto Networks, Dropbox’s customer usage amount is 204 times higher than that of competitor Box.

When asked about security, Jaswa skirted the issue, saying Dropbox would love to hear from its customers. IT departments in a number of companies have blacklisted Dropbox because of the fear that proprietary information will get leaked.

Dropbox was hacked earlier this year, causing the company to take on new forms of security. Now Dropbox uses two-factor authentication and encrypts your files both in transit and in storage. You data, however, is kept in a hybrid of Dropbox’s servers and Amazon S3.

“We’ve recgonized that from hearing from customers that the administrative side is really important,” said Jaswa.