I am amazed and frankly shocked at the number of IBM i software vendors who come out with anti-Dropbox positions instead of accepting the reality...Dropbox is here and it is pervasive.
Over the last 6 months several IBM i software vendors have issued press releases trying to position their proprietary software as the answer to their anti-Dropbox message. Clearly, they are acting just like the people in this picture. Practically every client we work with uses Dropbox and all of them use it in their personal lives. My parents use it for storing pictures and backing up their PC data and my 10 year old niece is even required to use it for school. I would call that pervasive!
When something is this pervasive it makes no sense to act like it will go away. Yet, as usual, many of our peers are not helping the perception of the IBM i community by promoting stone age software as the alternative. Many try to claim that Dropbox is dangerous. Well, if you put confidential data on any cloud application and you don't encrypt it first then you really are the one to blame for being negligent. Dropbox is only as dangerous as the people using it are careless.
Enough about the other IBM i software vendors. If they don't want to help IBM i customers, we are happy to do it. I wanted to post some things we are seeing our customers do with our intelligent Dropbox client called ARP-DROP. ARP-DROP allows you to programmatically build automation for sending, receiving and synchronizing files between the IBM i and Dropbox folders. Unlike smartphone and PC versions of Dropbox, you can control what is sent, received or synchronized and you can encrypt files using AES encryption. I am amazed at the various ways it is being used by our customers so this post is designed to help clients and prospects get some ideas of projects they can address using ARP-DROP.
One of our customers who sells licensed sports merchandise to retailers and distributors uses ARP-DROP to distribute reports to internal employees, specifically their sales reps, using Dropbox rather than email. This has worked great as it allows their users to access reports via smartphones and tablets. It was a great upgrade from emailing their representatives as over the last few years email has become unreliable due to file size limitations and whitelisting. But it doesn't end there.
A large distributor of industrial goods uses ARP-DROP and ARP-SAVE to manage journal receivers as part of their security compliance needs to have quick access to QAUDJRN data. Mandates such as PCI require quick access to system logs to show that you have forensics capabilities in case of suspected breaches. That same client also use ARP-DROP to synchronize their SIFT-IT filters and configurations across multiple LPARS and machines in their organizations.
Internally as a company we use Dropbox for our system backups and we encrypt and manage those backups using ARP-SAVE. Our customers are starting to use this method as well. If we have an issue, it is nice to be able to restore a library from some time ago in a matter of minutes. This has even led to a rise in the number of our customers using ARP-SAVE and ARP-DROP to back up their development environments so they can have manageable backups of their current work.
ARP-DROP is also being used as a managed file transfer solution by a media publishing company. Since Dropbox is always up, it has started to replace FTP servers as a way of addressing ad hoc file exchanges. We have seen customers using it for transmitting reports and other proprietary documents. Since ARP-DROP supports AES encryption there are plenty of tools that can be used on the other end to support encryption and decryption including WinZip for windows and AndroZip for tablets and smartphones.
What's next? Well, we have a few clients now deploying ARP-DROP for object distribution across LPARs and distributed machines. Seems logical to do that and what's great is it allows machines and partitions to retrieve the updates when they are ready. I wouldn't be surprised if we see clients asking us to interface our software updates to Dropbox so they can build automated synchronization processes to update their software to the latest releases we have. While we may not be able to predict its next use we can safely say that there will be many more innovative ways that ARP-DROP and Dropbox are used to solve problems.
