Box Puts Administrators in Control

Ten Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud

With cloud services such as Box rapidly becoming a standard element of the enterprise IT firmament, IT organizations are now looking for more sophisticated tools for managing these kinds of cloud services.

To provide those capabilities, Box has added an enterprise admin console that provides the ability to automate the application of policies while giving administrators the ability to directly manage the content stored in Box.

In addition, Box has announced that the Box Sync client has been rewritten to run 10 times faster and synchronize up to 10,000 files in a single folder while reducing processor consumption by as much as 25 percent.

According to Whitney Bouck, Box senior vice president of global marketing and general manager for the enterprise, with more users being sanctioned to use Box within enterprise environments, administrators clearly need access to a set of tools that allows them to more easily manage Box at scale.

Those tools are especially critical, says Bouck, as Box moves past being a service for a cloud platform for sharing and synchronizing files. While the rise of mobile computing accelerated the adoption of Box in the enterprise, Box is now evolving to become an applications platform in the cloud. To that end, Box has created its own consulting group while announcing a partnership with Capgemini to build custom applications on behalf of joint customers.

The challenges associated with managing the overall Box environment in the cloud are only going to increase. On the plus side, having Box means that IT organizations don’t have to devote resources to reinventing the wheel unless they decide they really need to control the entire IT environment up to and including the file synchronization services. But like any widely used IT platform, Box will ultimately require someone in the form of an administrator to actually manage it.