Data Backup Digest

The cloud storage market shows no signs of slowing down, nor does the competition within it. Every company is fighting their corner, trying to grab every user they can. Some will offer a vast amount of storage space, some low prices and some great service.

While cloud storage is freely available for home users, and many do make use of it, the real money lies in the enterprise user. Businesses are the ones more likely to shell out the cash for cloud storage. SpiderOak are well aware of this and are looking to appeal to enterprises with their new pricing plan.

SpiderOak are now charging businesses $5 per user per month. With this there are no limits on storage space, devices, file sizes or versions.

“Our aggressive pricing model and added features for the enterprise show that SpiderOak is stepping up to meet businesses' growing demand for private storage. After analyzing the market and seeing the convoluted ways other providers use metered pricing for certain levels of storage, we believe the simplicity and flexibility of a flat rate model is the best approach and it continues to resonate strongly,” said Ethan Oberman, CEO of SpiderOak.

SpiderOak hopes that this new pricing plan will make it easy for enterprises to “safely and securely put their sensitive data in the cloud”.

The new pricing plan applies to the Blue Enterprise hosted and private plans. A Blue SMB plan, with a similar pricing structure, is planned.

To coincide with these changes, SpiderOak have announced a new enterprise-grade mobile app and an enhanced enterprise management console.

The new console has been totally redesigned to have a more user-friendly interface. This will provide greater management and control capabilities. In addition to Active Directory integration, there is now locally managed user provisioning which allows administrators to provision new users straight through the console or the upload of csv files. There is also delegated administrator access and reporting.

The new mobile application has been specifically designed for enterprise users. The improved application will offer greater flexibility during deployment and will eventually offer options such as remote wipe. The application is free and is available on both Android and iOS, through the Google Play Store or Apple iTunes store respectively.

“Allowing organizations to sync their data across any operating system, SpiderOak provides the most flexible deployment options, from hosted storage to an on-premise solution (deploying a Private Cloud behind an enterprise's firewall),” said the company in a press release. “With the ability to access data from anywhere, while maintaining complete control over who can see it, companies using SpiderOak are finding the power of privacy in the cloud”.

The offering of unlimited storage, along with the improved administrator facilities, will no doubt sway a lot of enterprises to SpiderOak’s service. Businesses don’t want to be worrying about how much storage space they have left, on top of all the other IT concerns – a flat rate for unlimited storage is sure to turn a lot of heads and, SpiderOak is hoping, send the dollars their way.