Dropbox woos business users with new Teams service

Dropbox is trying to capture more business customers with a new service that lets corporate employees share and sync documents.

The new Dropbox for Teams works the same way as the free Dropbox service, allowing people to save files in the cloud and sync them with their PCs and mobile devices. But the Teams service offers options designed specifically for businesses.

IT administrators can manage their Dropbox for Teams users through a central set of controls. Dropbox is also offering phone support and centralized billing to cover all users. The service costs $795 a year for five users, with each additional seat priced at $125. The basic plan offers a full terabyte of shared storage, and each user added beyond the initial five gets an additional 200 gigabytes of space.

For companies concerned about security, Dropbox says that the files are encrypted and stored on Amazon's S3 service in secure data centers. As backup, all files are also synced on the users' individual computers and devices.

Of course, companies with sensitive or proprietary documents always need to think twice before storing their data in the cloud. Availability is also an issue; Amazon's own cloud-based services have suffered outages in the past.

Dropbox recently scored $250 million in venture capital, which the company said it plans to use to expand its business, bump up internal staff, make some acquisitions, and look for new partners.