Amazon officially threw its hat into the ring of enterprise storage Thursday at the AWS Summit meeting in New York.
Designed for companies, Amazon Zocalo promises to boost employee productivity by letting teams collaborate and share work files on desktop or mobile, while also offering IT managers the administrative controls and security they require. In some ways, it’s an extension of Amazon WorkSpaces, the enterprise-oriented “desktop computing in the cloud” service introduced last year.
WorkSpace also places Amazon in direct competition with the likes of Box, Microsoft, Google Drive and Dropbox. There’s a particular irony with the latter: Unlike the other services mentioned, Dropbox uses Amazon to support its Dropbox for Business offering.
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Zocalo will hit the market with its (pricing) guns blazing. After the 30-day trial (for up to 50 users), Amazon will only charge $5 monthly per user for 200 GB of storage. Plus, Amazon WorkSpaces customers can get Zocalo, for 50 GB of storage per user, for free.
That’s on the lower end of the spectrum right now. Google Drive charges enterprise customers $10 monthly per user for unlimited storage. Box costs $15 per user for 1TB. Dropbox also charges $15, but for what looks like unlimited storage. The cheapest of the services mentioned is Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business, though its regular $5 monthly fee (currently on sale for $2.50) only covers 25 GB of storage. But the company plans to expand that to 1 TB in the future.
Amazon Zocalo is open for limited preview, so to sign up or check out more information, visit this link to go directly to the site.
