Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
EDITORS’ NOTE
September 29, 2025: With this update, our lineup of recommended cloud storage and file-sharing services for businesses remains unchanged. The existing picks have been vetted for currency and availability.
Best for Advanced Storage Needs
Egnyte
- Supports GDPR and HIPAA
- Scans for sensitive industry- and jurisdiction-specific data
- Behavior analysis helps predict anomalous employee conduct
- Integrates with multiple third-party data-sharing services
- Enterprise tier has unlimited cloud storage
- Multiple account authentication options
- Customer-specific encryption keys
- Mobile app has OCR tech
- 15-day free trial
- Classifying data is a slow process
- Lacks monthly payment options
Egnyte’s offering has evolved from a standard cloud storage service to a full-fledged data governance solution. It provides enterprise-grade data security and strong tools for compliance with GDPR, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other regulations. It works across file servers, including Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. In addition, Egnyte automatically scans and classifies documents based on industry-specific rules, and applies policies accordingly.
If you have a complex data storage scenario, especially in a heavily regulated industry where mishandling data has serious consequences, the Egnyte suite should have tools that meet your needs. Although its tools are powerful and comprehensive, Egnyte isn’t necessarily the best bargain in the market. If your company is small or you don’t need Egnyte’s data governance features, another service might better suit your business.
- Excellent value
- Massive 1TB of storage per user
- Seamlessly syncs between browser, desktop, and mobile
- Easy-to-use workflow tools
- Password protection available on every stored file and folder
- Lacks data governance
- Can’t add extra storage
OneDrive for Business is more than just Microsoft’s answer to competing cloud storage services. Although it best integrates with Microsoft’s own products, one of its advantages is that it is compatible with various OS and productivity solutions, including Android, iOS, macOS, Microsoft 365, and Office 365. OneDrive’s ubiquity makes it a viable choice for any business that needs a flexible and reliable cloud storage service. What’s more, it regularly adds new features in areas such as collaboration, security, and AI-backed file organization.
By now, everyone who has used Windows should be at least familiar with OneDrive. That makes OneDrive for Business a particularly strong choice for Microsoft shops, especially if you’re already a Microsoft 365 customer. Even if your environment is a mix of Microsoft and other platforms, OneDrive for Business is affordable and has a lot to offer.
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Microsoft OneDrive for Business Review
- Easy-to-navigate interface
- GDPR and HIPPA compliant
- Group system simplifies managing team backups
- Unlimited data backups
- Two-factor authentication and private encryption keys enhance security
- Relatively low cost
- Mobile app doesn’t let you backup mobile devices
Backblaze offers unlimited storage at an affordable price, although it’s primarily a cloud backup service. It gives you a robust set of choices for backup and restore, including downloading from the cloud, saving to or copying from cloud storage, or having the company send you an external hard drive. Backblaze is also the company behind B2 Cloud Storage, an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product that’s supported by several other backup vendors.
If you’re primarily interested in backing up desktop and laptop endpoints, Backblaze Business should suit your needs. It lacks the file-sharing and document collaboration features of more generalized cloud storage services. Still, it provides customers with a wide variety of options for restoring backup data, which should appeal to even the most cautious companies.
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Backblaze Business Backup Review
- Many advanced syncing options
- Lets you annotate and edit documents, photos, and videos
- Remote-wipe capabilities
- Strong security
- Useful desktop and mobile apps
- Relatively expensive
- Data governance costs extra
- Lacks private key management
- Can’t edit imported files in Dropbox Paper
Dropbox Business is a powerful cloud storage solution that offers advanced security features, unlimited storage space, and flexible user management options. It has grown beyond simple storage and is versatile enough to serve as a document management tool. Dropbox Business also houses customer data in its own data centers for added security and offers a robust remote wipe feature.
If you’re looking for a cloud solution with a simple UI, unlimited storage, file retrieval, and vast options for user permissions, Dropbox Business can help your team collaborate more efficiently. That said, Dropbox has some limitations, particularly regarding online, collaborative file editing.
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Dropbox Business Review
- Strong value for allotted storage
- Cloud-to-cloud backup integration with other services
- Express option lets you quickly receive or transfer large amounts of data
- Lets you create or preview documents inside the cloud drive
- 24/7 customer support via live chat, email, and phone
- GDPR and HIPAA certified
- No cloud-side malware scanning
- Mobile app lacks OCR
IDrive Team provides comprehensive backup features for small teams, including support for desktop platforms and Microsoft’s back office applications. Its support options will appeal to organizations with limited IT resources thanks to its 24/7 chat support and rich resources.
Smaller businesses looking for a cloud backup solution that’s easy to use, cost-effective, and reliable should consider IDrive Team. It’s an excellent choice for distributed teams that need a fast and secure backup solution. However, its design does have its drawbacks. For example, IDrive lacks features found in competing products, such as malware scanning and ransomware protection.
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IDrive Team Review
- Unlimited storage and user accounts with most plans
- Includes the Canvas whiteboarding tool
- Strong security
- Useful Hubs content portals
- Occasionally slow account navigation
- Adobe Acrobat subscription needed for PDF conversions or exports
- External collaborators have limited editing options
Box is a mature cloud storage and file-sharing provider for businesses of all sizes. In addition to secure storage, it offers syncing, collaboration, workflow automation, password policy enforcement, and tools for regulatory compliance. It integrates with a wide variety of software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms and Microsoft Office. Box also stands out by offering unlimited storage and unlimited users for most of its plans, making it a scalable and cost-effective option.
Organizations that want an established, reliable cloud storage provider will be in good hands with Box. It has a full range of storage and file-sharing features without tying you into a productivity suite’s ecosystem. Unfortunately, Box falls short of several competitors when viewing and editing various document types.
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Box (for Business) Review
- Intuitive, easy-to-use interface
- Fast syncing between browser and desktop
- Administrative tools for sharing files with teams and departments
- Flexible pricing tiers
- Lets you create a custom email domain
- Lacks Task and Workflow tabs
- Best privacy features are locked behind the Enterprise tier
- No password protection for shared files
- Anyone with your email can place items in your account
- Lacks data governance
Google Drive offers advanced data backup and sync, file collaboration, and productivity features. It is designed for SMBs and enterprises that want to integrate Google Cloud storage with productivity services they already use, such as Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365. Google Drive Enterprise uses AI to manage files and workflows, and it provides flexible storage options, powerful search and organizational features, security, sharing, and encryption protocols for business use.
If Microsoft’s approach to cloud storage with OneDrive appeals to you, you should also give Google Drive a look. Like Microsoft 365, it enables real-time collaboration with Microsoft Office documents in the cloud, while integrating Google AI file management. Google Drive works best when integrated with Google Workspace, so dedicated Microsoft shops should probably pass on it.
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Google Drive (for Business) Review
- GDPR compliant
- Useful mobile apps that are essential to the Livedrive experience
- Easy to expand users and storage
- Quick and attentive customer service
- Lacks HIPAA compliance
- Doesn’t password-protect files and folders
- Occasionally awkward navigation
- No OCR
Livedrive is primarily a backup and restore solution. Still, it’s unique on our list because, despite being a cloud solution and therefore theoretically capable of global reach, it’s focused on the needs of businesses in the EU and UK, with servers located in Europe. The EU regions it currently supports include France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, although it is expanding its support to more countries. Its UI is easy to use, and the same goes for its mobile apps for Android and iOS.
(Note: Livedrive is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)
Companies that require strict compliance with EU regulations, such as the GDPR, should consider Livedrive, especially if they are geographically located in the EU. Although it’s a viable option for US companies, Livedrive is pricey for what it does in that region. Even for companies in the EU and UK, it’s best for companies with only modest needs for backup and restore. Notably, it lacks prebuilt integrations with popular business suites, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
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Livedrive (for Business) Review
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The Best Business Cloud Storage and File-Sharing Providers for 2025
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Buying Guide: The Best Business Cloud Storage and File-Sharing Providers for 2025
What Does Business-Grade File Sharing Do?
A good cloud storage service gives you the flexibility to use it as your organization demands. For example, you can focus on collaboration and file-sharing features, allowing employees to edit the same files in a team space while protecting their work with versioning. Alternately, you can tweak a service to act as a lightweight document management system or even a workflow manager that controls how your company’s data flows through a user chain.
Customization is more important now than ever due to the rise of remote work. The rub is that effective customization requires planning, especially when it involves important workflows. A cloud storage and file-sharing service may have a long list of features, but that doesn’t mean you’ll automatically take advantage of them all. Knowing the features that will work best and in what combination is planning that only you, your IT staff, and your front-line business managers can do.
Focus your planning efforts on key workflows initially and start small. Attention to core abilities, especially reliable accessibility, effective backups, secure storage, and user and group management. Once you understand how you want all that to work with your workers being so widely distributed, you can expand into automated workflows, collaboration, and third-party app integrations. Sometimes, core app integrations should be considered earlier—for example, if your business has standardized on a particular productivity platform. (i.e., Google Workspace shops will choose Google Drive, while Microsoft 365 outfits will likely select Microsoft OneDrive).
If you don’t have an obvious integration target, such as Google Workspace, the cloud has made it easier for different services to communicate with each other using open standards. These days, you can mix and match cloud storage solutions with a long list of current productivity and document management systems. If you need custom coding, most vendors provide REST APIs, allowing you to exchange data and call functions between different app services. IFTTT or Zapier will let you build cross-app automation with a fairly low learning curve if you need better automation.
Cloud companies also see the value of interoperability, though they primarily address it in high-value customer categories and verticals. For example, Microsoft and Salesforce have huge partner ecosystems with large catalogs of targeted service offerings. A partner takes the company’s core products, like Microsoft 365, and builds integrations and workflow features using that product and one or more third-party cloud services. Those solutions are built to attract specific kinds of businesses or verticals. Of course, the more third-party services you need, the higher the monthly price per user.
So, if you’re looking to use a cloud storage service in a particular way, be sure to plan the necessary steps to understand exactly what kinds of custom tweaks and workflows you’ll need. But once that’s done, don’t assume you’ll need to build everything yourself. Instead, explore the integration and value-added app marketplaces offered by your key app providers and those provided by the storage service. Someone may have already built the perfect end-to-end solution for you, and that’s cheaper and easier than rolling your own.
How Much File Storage Do You Need?
Many companies focus mainly on a cloud storage and file-sharing service’s storage capacity and how much they’ll get for the price. That’s still something to consider, but overall, storage space is now more affordable than ever and available in high volume. Multiple terabytes (TB) are commonplace, and no longer a big differentiator between services (especially now that adding storage capacity is easy and cheap).
If you suddenly need an extra 100GB of space for a fast project, most cloud storage vendors make adding that capacity a simple matter of clicking a few buttons. That won’t only give you the new space, but also automatically increase your subscription charge. Even better, once the project is complete, you can easily adjust both capacity and price back down again. This elastic capacity is easy for a cloud storage vendor, and almost impossible for an on-premises resource.
Of course, all this freedom makes things complicated, especially in a larger company. If storage capacity and subscription rates change because department managers constantly alter their requirements, that can play havoc with a long-term budget. Be sure to set up controls around who gets to adjust the capacity (your IT department is key here), how new capacities should be reported, what the minimal security and permission requirements are, which backup policies need to apply, and how often this can happen in a given time slice (quarterly, annually, etc.).
Finding a Cloud Data Center
All this paints a rosy picture when designing your customized and highly distributed storage service. Still, several devils lurk in the details. A key consideration is determining exactly where your data resides. Some providers maintain their own data centers, while others outsource their storage to a third-party cloud, often Amazon Web Services (AWS) or a similar Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider.
That’s an important point to consider: Are you signing a service-level agreement (SLA) with a cloud provider directly responsible for the infrastructure, or is the provider beholden to another party? Investigate that firm and examine its track record if it’s a third party. Then, look at the levels of service it offers. All the major players offer some uptime guarantee, but it’s worth noting that location is also an important factor.
How many data centers does the third party have? How many are local or in a different location? If you’re a US company, purchasing a storage resource with servers only in Europe makes little sense.
Finally, is your data distributed among them for better reliability? You should be able to determine those answers easily from a target vendor and designate where you want your data stored, allowing you to optimize your storage for access speed and redundancy.
Determine How Workers Will Access Files
How your employees access their files is critical and can widely vary among vendors. Data-sharing functionality should involve a sync client or some other desktop-based software that ensures that files in the cloud are synced with local replicas. However, some vendors can have other points of access. For example, all cloud storage companies provide a web client, but some might also make this the primary client. It’s something you need to test before committing.
Mobile devices are also an issue. Many newly distributed employees are trying to use personal devices for work, and many are mobile. Does your cloud storage and file-sharing service have mobile clients? If so, you need to determine which platforms are supported and test how those clients work. Syncing, for example, needs to function differently for mobile versus desktop since device CPU and storage resources are so different. Security and user access also work differently, especially if user credentials incorporate device types.
Another thing to remember is that you won’t always be accessing your data directly through the storage vendor. For instance, Microsoft OneDrive for Business can sync with Microsoft Teams, its team messaging platform, and the team sites that are part of its popular SharePoint Online collaboration platform. So your users might work on files in those apps and then see them automatically saved to an associated cloud storage service, in this case, OneDrive.
By comparison, Box (for Business) provides a fully functional web client with drag-and-drop support. Shared data can be stored in folders created by individuals or in team folders created and controlled by team leads or administrators. But it all happens in a browser window. Making it happen inside another app will take more work unless Box pre-builds the integration for you.
For most workflows, you’ll need some version of team folders. How that works must be carefully considered before purchase. Working with potential users to determine what they like best and how they currently get work done can go a long way toward making your buying decision easier.
Is Cloud Data Storage Secure?
Keeping data safe is a more significant challenge today than ever. Features once considered advanced are now simply baseline capabilities. Enterprise-grade identity management, for example, is something every storage vendor should offer. That means not only matching an individual user’s credentials against what files and folders they’re allowed to access, but adding multi-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) features.
Secure storage means protecting data from more than prying eyes. Redundant storage layers mean you should be able to map which data centers house not just the primary copy of your data but also the first backup tier. So, if you have 500GB of data with Service X, you should be able to store the files your employees access most frequently in data centers close to where they work. Then, Service X should also allow you to sync those files with a copy located in another data center, one still operated by the company. So if your primary instance goes down, another data copy can be immediately available. Service X should also perform regular backups of both sites and store that data in a different location. Finally, you need integration with a third-party cloud backup provider so you can automatically perform another backup on your own and store it on servers from an entirely different vendor, or even on your on-premises server or network-attached storage (NAS) device.
That may sound like overkill, but the beauty of a managed cloud service is that this kind of tiered architecture is relatively easy to build from the customer’s standpoint and fairly automatic once it’s established. As long as you test it periodically, you can rest assured that your data will remain safe and accessible, regardless of what happens.
Encryption is another bedrock security feature. All the tested services support this to varying degrees, but if you encounter one that doesn’t, simply continue your search. Encryption is a must-have feature, and you need it while the data is being transmitted between your users and the cloud (as well as when it reaches those cloud servers and stops moving). Testing these capabilities means understanding the encryption schemes being used and their impact on data retrieval performance.
Recommended by Our Editors
Cloud storage providers work diligently to enhance security and keep your data safe. To such an extent that most IT professionals trust cloud security as much as, or even more than, what’s available on-premises. The logic is fairly simple: Most IT professionals don’t have the budget to research, deploy, and manage the advanced security capabilities that cloud services offer, as it’s key to their primary business.
What About Data Privacy Regulations?
Aside from simply keeping customer data safe, another factor that has significantly bolstered cloud security is the need to comply with important regulatory standards, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and ISO 27001. Livedrive for Business is somewhat unique in this regard because it’s focused on European customers. It’s built around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is why its servers are located in the EU and UK.
Your legal staff generally determines the regulatory requirements that you’ll need to factor into your planning. Cloud storage providers typically have several built-in features to address compliance issues.
For example, every file and folder must have an audit trail. This highlights when it was first stored on the system, how and when it has been modified, who accessed it, and what kinds of operations were performed, such as copying, deleting, or moving. This is paramount for the more heavily regulated or security-conscious verticals. Due to mistakes or misconduct, losing mission-critical files can often cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in reparations or lost capital.
File retention is another common legal requirement. You need to control how long data lives on the system, its accessibility, and when it can be deleted or archived. Your cloud storage provider should make these features easy to use. Having the right information can often mean the difference between being in or out of compliance with federal or industry-specific regulations in heavily regulated industries.
The most sophisticated cloud storage systems, such as Egnyte Enterprise, offer full data governance capabilities. These systems can automatically categorize documents and apply controls based on industry-specific or custom policies.
This means that before purchasing any cloud-based file-sharing service, you should sit down with your IT staff and compliance expert to understand exactly where data and apps need to be located and what they must support to meet the compliance regulations essential to your business.
(Getty Images/Teera Konakan)
Ready to Move to the Best Cloud Storage?
Choosing a cloud storage and file-sharing service for your organization can seem daunting when considering the numerous variables. Not only do different businesses have varying requirements, but they also demand security for that data. Striking a balance between usability, security, and customization must ultimately be driven by business requirements. However, understanding those requirements is a serious task that requires real work; it’s not something you want to address with a snap decision.
Although some of the services we reviewed make it easier to migrate your data from their service, not all are so thoughtful. Once you’ve signed up and moved your data onto a particular service, it’s generally not trivial to move it to another, so it’s a good idea to do your homework thoroughly before committing to any one provider.
Planning is key, so sit down with business leads, IT managers, and, if possible, a representative from the cloud provider. It’ll take some time and effort, but mapping out the features necessary for your organization’s current and future needs will make finding the right solution much easier.
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