Is this an unsolvable problem? What questions can cloud services answer and finally get through to corp IT? Who's startup is grappling with this problem and winning?<p>To be clear, I know how I could get around it... and I am not planning to do that... I am asking how can we progress the IT point of view and allow enterprises to adopt these revolutionary tools rather than fear them. Is it a lost cause?
There's a good reason: I would argue that Dropbox has questionable security practices (by that I mean look around their site and try to find an in-depth description of how then insure individual account security... it leaves me with many questions :-). Dropbox stores and manages the encryption keys on their servers and they don't let users specify their own encryption keys. If someone manages to break into their server farm and gets access to those keys (or the method by which they are algorithmically generated), then lookout!<p>At the same time, a lot of people email sensitive documents into and out of enterprises without any sort of encryption. I'm not sure which is worse.<p>(no, I'm not a enterprise IT guy :-)
How is dropbox a revolutionary tool? Fileservers have existed for quite some time. File server accessible over the internet have existed for quite some time. (It was easy even in windows 95).<p>Focus on your needs and ask IT to develop a way for you to access your corporate resources on the go.
The reason that enterprises have IT departments is so that they can control <i>everything</i> in house. The saas model (dropbox and similar remotely hosted services) doesn't really fit here because it separates IT from the services that it is supposed to manage (think of the legal and security mess of spreading your company's data to a bunch of 3rd party services).<p>Your best bet is to find some white-label/internal solution similar to dropbox and get your IT guys to install it... but it'll be tough to convince them that the benefits outweigh the costs (everything IT does costs 10x more than you think it should).
It's corporate IT's death struggles you're observing. Unfortunately they don't tend to die quickly.<p>What I've seen again and again is people just routing around them. And around any other corp strategies that stop them from getting their jobs done.
I think that if a startup made encryption and data security a priority and had the amount of funding it takes to break the enterprise market, they'd start to slowly (as usual in the enterprise space) make more headway and gain acceptance in this area. IT actually likes to offload things when they have a reasonable assurance of control.<p>Tarsnap is a good starting point, but it's CLI, doesn't work on Windows, and isn't really geared to big businesses.