Amazon today announced that it’s making Zocalo, its secure document storage and sharing service designed for enterprise use, generally available. The news comes, not coincidentally, on a day when cloud storage competitor Dropbox announced lowered pricing and storage increases for its Pro customers.
Zocalo, which is Spanish for town square, launched into a limited preview just last month, along with very aggressive price points. For $5 per user per month, end users would receive 200 GB of storage. They can then use that service to store all manner of files, comment on and within files, share them with others, upload new versions and more, all from any device, including PCs and Macs, as well as Android and iOS devices.
Meanwhile, IT admins are able to manage Zocalo, integrating it with existing corporate directories, including Active Directory, which allows users to sign in with their existing Active Directory credentials. IT can also apply the appropriate permissions for users, making sure they only have access to the documents they’re meant to see.
The Zocalo service is now open to all AWS customers, says Amazon this morning in a blog post, and includes a 30-day free trial, as previously announced.
While Zocalo is aimed at the enterprise crowd, many of whom are still paying for legacy, on-premise solutions, it is to some extent a competitor with consumer-first services like Dropbox, which is now trying to stretch itself further into the “Pro” and business markets where it’s up against other cloud storage rivals like Box and Google Drive.
It’s also not the first cloud storage service from Amazon – the company offers a consumer-grade service called Amazon Cloud Drive, a Google Drive competitor whose biggest advantage may be its integration with the company’s own Fire phone. (Fire phone users have unlimited photo storage for their smartphone photos in Cloud Drive.)
Along with today’s public launch, Amazon notes that AWS CloudTrail, a web service that records AWS API calls and delivers log files to you, is also now integrated with Zocalo. CloudTrail will now record calls made with the Zocalo API, which is currently internal, but is planned to be made public in the future, says Amazon.
