Google undercuts the market on unlimited storage

Google has announced a "premium" business version of Drive that includes "unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls for $10 per user per month".

Drive for Work was launched at the Google I/O event early Thursday morning Australian eastern time. The product was released globally.

"Every year companies create more data than the last, adding megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. Well, today, we’re taking bytes out of the conversation. For $10/user/month, businesses get unlimited storage for all their employees and can store files up to 5 TB in size," said Scott Johnston, Google Drive director of product management, in a blog post announcing the product.

Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Google Enterprise Australia, said "As demand for cloud increases and the volume of data that employees create continues to rise, we think businesses should never have to think about storage again."

Dropbox for Business offers $17 per user per month for unlimited storage and Microsoft OneDrive offers 25GB, soon to be 1TB, for $2.50 per user per month with an annual commitment.

Amazon Cloud Storage has bundles ranging up to 1000GB, which costs $500 per year.

Johnston said that Drive for Work would include the same benefits of Apps for Business such as "24x7 phone support and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee".

A statement from the search giant said that Drive is now "the world's most popular cloud storage product" with 190 million users. In Australia, It cites Dick Smith, Woolworths, Fairfax, Elders and Speciality Fashion Group as prominent business adopters of the storage service.

Johnston said that the business edition adds "new admin controls, advanced file audit reporting and eDiscovery services" to the standard Drive product.

"New fine-grained controls let admins customize the Drive experience, such as which employees can install the desktop sync client. With the new audit view you can see activity like moving, deleting or sharing a file within or outside the company, and an audit API will also be available for developers," he said.

The blog post also mentioned that Google Apps Vault is also included to allow searching for compliance requirements.

The announcement also revealed that all files uploaded to Drive from today will be encrypted, both in transit and at rest; and that Office documents can now be opened and edited in native format, to eliminate the need for additional software.

Johnston assured security compliance on the new business product, writing: "Drive for Work also offers enterprise-grade security and compliance, including a SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Type II, SOC 2-audit, ISO 27001 certification, adherence to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, and can support industry-specific requirements like HIPAA."