Box ups the ante for upload speeds with the launch of Accelerator, its worldwide content delivery network.
With market demand growing for cloud-based storage services, Web-based data
storage specialist Box on Sept. 17 announced the launch of Accelerator, a
global data transfer network designed to give customers up to a 10 times boost
in upload speeds.
The platform is a combination of new infrastructure in nine locations
throughout the world and network intelligence software. The company said it has
Accelerator locations in the Northwest, Midwest and on the East Coast in the
United States, as well as the new Box office in London, among other places.
Box is one of several options organizations have for uploading and storing
data in the cloud, alongside Google Drive, Dropbox and SkyDrive. While security
is a rising concern for many, upload speeds are a major competitive factor,
which led Box to hire information and analytics specialist Neustar to conduct
an analysis of the upload performance for multiple cloud storage providers for
a period of three days earlier this month.
The analysis covered the performance of uploading a 25MB file to four cloud
storage services: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive. Box had the lowest
average upload time of 15.7 seconds, which was approximately 2.7 times faster
than the closest competitor, Google Drive.
"With Box Accelerator, we're able to give our customers the fastest way to
get their content to the cloud. What can 10X faster uploads mean to a business?
Look at it this way: instead of waiting one hour for a several-hundred MB file
to post, 10X faster means you get it done in under 6 minutes," Grant Shirk, Box's
senior enterprise product marketing manager, wrote in a company blog post. "Our
mission at Box is to fundamentally change the way people work-we're constantly
seeking new ways to improve the efficiency of everyday tasks. A big part of
this is making sure every experience is clean, simple and fast for our users
around the world."
In July, the company announced that it had landed a huge new $125 million
investment, which includes $100 million from global growth investor General
Atlantic. The investments will fund continued support of Box's growing
enterprise customer base, global expansion, and product research and
development. Box now counts more than 7 million individual and 120,000 business
customers, with about 250,000 new users joining each month.
In an effort to further reach out to enterprises, Box unveiled a slew of
content management tools in May, as well as an enterprise licensing agreement
for new and existing customers deploying Box to their organization. In response
to the growing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, Box also released mobile
device security settings for Google Android devices, which give IT admins the
ability to apply passcode locks and enhanced permissions for offline file access
for a variety of Box applications.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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