Dropbox cloud storage is making a cheap offer targeting colleges and universities with Dropbox Education.
According to Engadget, Dropbox's main revenue focus for the last few years has been on its business offering, rather than in its consumer one. Over 150,000 companies are already using Dropbox Business. The company is also pushing Dropbox for huge enterprise businesses.
Now, Dropbox Education is switching the target to colleges and universities. This product is essentially similar to the Dropbox business offering that provides companies with unlimited cloud storage combined with extensive version history, a variety of security controls and administration controls necessary to keep data secure in large enterprises.
Dropbox Education comes with nearly the same features, but with a cheaper price tag. Dropbox Education director of education Jason Katcher wrote in a blog post that the product costs $49 per user per year and provides additional cost reductions for higher-volume deployments.
Compared to this, Dropbox's enterprise-focused offering costs in the range of $150 to $300 per user. However, for Dropbox Education, the cheaper price comes with limited storage. Each user in a team gets 15GB of storage.
Besides that one notable change, Dropbox Education provides basically the same security and the same experience as the Dropbox for Business product. For now, Dropbox Education is focusing on colleges and universities, but the company announced that it will potentially extend the offerings for K-12 institutions as well.
Dropbox has made in the past some concessions to ensure compatibility. For instance, the company has launched a page on its website that is relevant to media organization and has become compliant with HITECH and HIPAA laws for health care.
Venture Beat reports that the latest maneuver is unusual for the cloud file syncing and sharing service. Until now, the company did not offer special price solutions for individual industries.
Katcher also wrote that more than 4,000 educational organizations use Dropbox. This new industry-specific push is aimed to ensure that that figure will further go up.
