InfraScale will give free FileLocker accounts with 100 Gigabytes of storage per user to Dropbox customers with between 250 and 500 employees. Dropbox is the leader in this crowded space, and InfraScale’s FileLocker is trying to set itself apart from the pack by emphasizing how rogue online file sharing accounts — also called shadow IT — presents a security risk for companies.

“Dropbox says it has 95 percent of the organizations in the U.S.,” said Sheilin Herrick, InfraScale’s director of marketing. “So this is primarily for IT administrators that want to drop Dropbox.”

The offer is good until April 30.

Dropbox moved to strengthen its security features in the latest version of its business-focused Dropbox for Teams service released last month.

InfraScale has focused on security from the start with FileLocker, which launched in November 2012. FileLocker has a three-tier security model, in which the service is installed behind the company’s firewall for private cloud deployments. It also secures data in transit with 256-Bit SSL encryption connection and 256-Bit AES encryption for data at rest.

“We want to help IT managers deal with shadow IT,” said Stephen Gold, InfraScale’s director of business development.”

This service allows IT managers to control permissions, set up bulk accounts, delete files and accounts other centralized controls. Fueled by the BYOD movement, many employees have started to deploy online file sharing products like Dropbox as a way to synchronize data with their mobile devices.

“But rogue accounts represent a serious security and compliance risk to organizations. When end-users store company files in the OFS provider’s data center in a public cloud, the files are placed outside the reach of the organization’s privacy policies and security controls,” according to an Enterprise Strategy Group report titled “Spotting and Stopping Rogue Online File Sharing.”

For its Special Report on Shadow IT in the Workplace, Nasuni surveyed 1,300 corporate IT users. Online file sharing and bring your own devices (BYOD) are gaining in popularity as employees  use PCs, iPads, smartphones and tablets to access work-related files. And they use these devices to work from airports, homes, cafes and other locations outside of the corporate office.

Companies are starting to call this “shadow IT” because these services and devices often are not controlled by traditional IT departments. For many companies, it’s a growing security problem.

“We were surprised that the percentage of users is one out of five. That is not a trivial number. There is an incredible amount of usage and it was higher than we expected,” said Connor Fee, Nasuni’s director of marketing. “We talked to a lot of IT guys and they complained about Dropbox specifically.”

Other services mentioned include iCloud and Google Drive. The survey included 300 IT managers and 1,000 employees. The survey found that one in five employees uses Dropbox for work files, and half of employees who use file sharing services do not know if their companies have a policy against it.

The report also found that corporate executives are the worst offenders, with vice presidents and directors most likely to use Dropbox despite the security risks. About 58% of employees with personal smart phones or tablets access work files from those devices. The survey found that 54% of respondents work at organizations that do not allow access to file sharing.

“The fact that corporate leaders are the worst offenders tells me IT is failing to deliver on something that is needed,” Fee said. “Having and educating about a policy is not enough. It needs to be address beyond policies.”

Google Drive will almost certainly add to the consumerization of IT that Randy Kerns recently wrote about because it will expand the number of users functioning as their own storage administrators. And the attention it has already sparked will make it more likely that most businesses will at least consider using the cloud for some of its file storage and data protection.

“On the face of it, this topic does not appear to concern the corporate IT manager or CIO, but chances are employees will start using this service to do more than share family photos and recipes,” Ovum principal analyst Richard Edwards wrote in an e-mail about Google Drive’s impact on the enterprise. “Corporate email systems are notorious for their measly storage quotas and message attachment size limitations, and so the sharing and distribution of large corporate files, such as PowerPoint presentations, engineering drawings, and creative content are an obvious use case for Google Drive.”

Edwards said Ovum recommends what he calls “business-grade” cloud collaboration services such as Box and Huddle because of their superior feature management and administration capabilities. Google Drive is seen as a prime competitor to these services as well as other popular file sharing clouds from Citrix, Dropbox, Egnyte, Nomadix, SpiderOak, SugarSync and Syncplicity.

Andres Roldriguez, CEO of cloud NAS vendor Nasuni, said Google Drive can go beyond the file sharing services already on the market because it controls the application stack and a mobile operating system. And while he doesn’t see Google Drive as a competitor to enterprise storage vendors, he does warn that enterprise vendors need to address data on mobile devices in a hurry.

“File storage and synchronization engines are changing storage as we know it,” Rodriguez wrote in an email. “Any large storage vendor that isn’t thinking about how to extend its current data center offerings to mobile is going to be unpleasantly surprised in the next 24 months as more workers shift to accessing data from tablets and smart phones. The pressure on IT is already intense. The control points for much corporate storage today are the Domain Controller (DC) and the CIFS protocol. No one wants to re-architect access control because of mobile users. What we need to figure out is how to extend the access control model we have today to include the new platforms.”

Ranajit Nevatia, VP of marketing for Nasuni rival Panzura, says Google Drive is a long way from becoming an enterprise service because adding features such as global namespace, file locking and enterprise encryption is “damn hard.” He said there is a big difference between file sharing and project sharing, which is what enterprise storage must support.

“Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, iDrive, these are becoming a dime a dozen now,” Nevatia said. “Everybody’s coming up with file sharing with free amounts of storage associated with them. When you look at the target market and use cases they’re going after, it’s not overlapping with what we’re doing. It will put pressure on consumer level file sharing services, but it’s not meant for large enterprises. Our customers collaborate on projects like architectural engineer design or handle large amounts of research data. We’re not talking about two gigabytes or five gigabytes. We’re talking terabytes of data.”

Tom Gelson, Imation’s director of business development and its cloud strategist, said he has mixed reactions about Google’s entry into cloud storage. Imation’s data protection appliances are used by cloud providers and Gelson said the vendor plans on launching its own cloud service. And as an SMB vendor, that would make it a Google competitor. But Gelson agrees with Nevatia about the need for security in the cloud.
“Google rubber stamps cloud backup, because everybody knows Google,” he said. “It’s exciting, but we’re all concerned. Imation is focused on SMBs and if you talk to an SMB IT director, the biggest concern is security. That’s Imation’s biggest focus. We want to make sure data is secure once it sits on the cloud.”

Gelson pointed out Imation acquired three security companies in 2011-– Encryptx, MXI and Iron Key. He said Imation encrypts data in flight to the cloud, and also encrypts data on its RDX removable hard drive media.

Ethan Oberman, CEO of online file sharing company SpiderOak, brings up another potential sore spot for Google – privacy. Oberman wonders if Google will try to integrate Google Drive with Google Plus and if it will record users’ activities.

“Google has definitely been one of the more innovative companies since its inception, so the market will have high expectations for how Google Drive might change the way we work within the cloud,” said Oberman wrote in an e-mail statement. “There is obviously a very fine line between harvesting consumer data across Google platforms for a ‘richer experience’ versus the potential reality that every step we take on Google’s turf is recorded and analyzed. How Google addresses the 800-pound gorilla knocking on the door – privacy – will define how the company is widely perceived by the public. Google Drive will be a key part of this test.”