Box Drive masquerades as a legacy network file share

Box is targeting on-premise enterprises with its latest document-sharing tool, Box Drive, designed to make cloud naysayers feel at home by mimicking classic network file shares.

Drive comes with a twist on the traditional network sharing software, however - it offers unlimited storage.

Currently in public beta, there's no solid release date yet for the product, but the collaboration firm's EMEA senior VP told Cloud Pro that with 74,000 business customers, Box wants to go after companies still running their own data centres.

"We believe there's still hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers who still haven't moved to the cloud," said David Benjamin. "Many of those customers aren't moving to the cloud because they are still reliant on legacy desktop workflows.

"They face a choice: moving entirely to the cloud and forgoing desktop workflows or they stay with their desktop applications and forgo the opportunity to go to the cloud. What we see more often is people put a foot in both camps. Your IT ecosystem is a little bit in the cloud and a little bit on-premise."

Box believes this hybrid approach results in a "mess", with IT admins forced to integrate on-premise tools like SharePoint and EMC with cloud suites like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive.

Much easier, the firm contends, for a company to store all its files in Box's cloud, and allow employees to download whatever they need to work on to their local desktops - an idea pioneered by Dropbox's Project Infinite last April.

Much cheaper, too - Box estimates that 78% of its customers have started retiring legacy technology like network file shares, with enterprises saving between $1.3 million and $6 million by doing so.

But while Box's tool makes use of the company's data centre hosting deals with IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer unlimited storage, it also aims to reassure on-premise firms by keeping the look and feel of a traditional network share drive such users are more familiar with - the desktop application is natively integrated into Windows Explorer and Mac Finder.

One of the challenges for storing all your data on-premise is creating siloes between various storage systems, and Benjamin explained: "That creates the security risk of duplication of content, and these result in additional costs. These are key challenges enterprises are trying to solve."

Of course, Box is a partner of Microsoft, which already runs OneDrive as part of its Office 365 suite, and Box Drive competes directly with Redmond's storage tool.

But Benjamin said: "With Microsoft we are not just competitors but partners as well and Box is integrated into the Microsoft productivity suite, and a lot of people [who] use Box also use Office 365 and they complement each other extremely well."

With no release date, it's unclear when Box will release Box Drive, but existing or new customers with enterprise agreements can use the unlimited storage tool at no extra cost.