Box.net Extends Online Backup Offering From 1GB to 5GB for Free

Cloud content management provider Box.net announced storage upgrades for business and personal plans that set a new industry standard for content-centric business services. The increased storage allotments are designed to empower Box’s 4 million users to manage, share and collaborate around business data in the cloud without concern for storage limitations, and follow major technical scale and security milestones, including SAS70 II certification.

"Vendors are seeing tremendous economies of scale by delivering business applications over the web, and at Box, we’re continuing to pass those benefits on to our customers," said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.net. "End users and IT administrators should no longer have to worry about traditional issues such as storage allotments, bandwidth limitations and patches; with today’s upgrades, we want to empower them to focus on what really matters: the sharing and collaboration activities that move their business forward. The amount of information generated by enterprises is going to increase exponentially in the coming years, and our vision is to get closer to an ‘infinite cloud’ to help these organizations manage and collaborate around all that content online in a simple, powerful way."

Box is increasing the amount of free storage available to personal users from 1GB to 5GB, and starting the Business plan at 500GB of shared storage – more than triple the average currently available to Box Business customers. The Enterprise plan for large deployments will offer unlimited storage, enabling organizations to manage terabytes of data in the cloud with enterprise-grade security and sophisticated user permission settings. Expansive, elastic storage capabilities will become increasingly important in the coming years as enterprises and individuals experience a data explosion; a recent IDC report estimates that the amount of digital data generated in 2020 will exceed data generated in 2009 by 44X. Thanks to major improvements in hard drive efficiency and utilization, cloud services can scale to meet these demands without the maintenance, regular upgrades and fundamental limitations of on-premise solutions.

With two enterprise-grade data centers and recent SAS70 II certification, Box has achieved significant technical scale and security milestones. Today, more than 60,000 businesses including Hawaiian Airlines, T-Mobile and ABC News use Box as a central hub for content, which is then easily extensible to other people, business applications, and devices. With the new storage allotments, users will be able to access massive amounts of data on-the-go though Box’s customized applications for iPad, iPhone and Android devices. Box’s integrations with other leading cloud business solutions such as Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, SAP StreamWork and SugarCRM will also benefit from the storage upgrades, making more Box content accessible from within partnering applications. The changes will be effective immediately for new Box customers, and rolled out to existing users and businesses over the next month at no additional cost.