BetterCloud has been named a DropBox premier partner, and DropBox will offer the joint offering to their customers from $2 per user per month.

Dropbox has announced a new set of premier partners, with a new set of deeper integrations. One of those is New York-based SaaS operations management provider BetterCloud, whose platform offers multi-vendor management and security for SaaS applications, with the others being Google Cloud Identity, Coronet, Proofpoint, and SailPoint. As part of the expanded partnership, Dropbox will offer a special edition of “BetterCloud for Dropbox” to all of their customers for $2 per user per month.

BetterCloud is a SaaS operations management provider, whose platform offers multi-vendor management and security for SaaS applications. They initially started out with a focus on Google, and Google remains a strong partner, but they have broadened to cover a large number of vendors, using their focus on developing and maintaining deep API connections to centralize administration across SaaS apps, uncover security blind spots, and automate manual security and IT processes.

“We have been a regular DropBox technology partner for almost three years, and their inviting us to become a premier partner significantly expands the relationship,” said Shreyas Sadalgi, BetterCloud’s Chief Business Strategy Officer. “They only have 50 such partners. Before, we were just a regular technology partner of theirs. But in the last year things have gone up in a good way in the relationship, and the new status reflects their view that we deliver a lot of value to the integration.”

The BetterCloud integration adds significant security and operations management capabilities to DropBox.

“The beauty of SaaS applications is that it is so easy to share data – both within and outside a company,” Sadalgi said. “But that also means that intentionally or unintentionally, information is shared outside the walls of the company, and that causes problems and breaches. We can deliver really crisp security functionality that address these concerns, and can safely implement security policies for DropBox customers. If a file was automatically shared, then we can detect that change occurring in near-real time and alert the customer’s technicians. We can also let them create a policy allowing types of file sharing occurred under certain conditions, and provide security policy enforcement for sensitive data sharing outside the organization.

“Our other value proposition is that we automate the manual work done by Dropbox admins during the process of employee onboarding and offboarding,” Sadalgi added. “We can automate all the steps through a custom workflow, so that when a new employee joins a DropBox team or if they leave the company or the DropBox team, files are moved in accordance with data governance policies. We can make that reality automatically.”

While BetterCloud has a deep relationship with DropBox that stems from their long relationship, their business model is based on extensive integrations, and unsurprisingly, they support DropBox’s competitors as well.

“We have integrations with all of the content collaboration platforms like Slack, Box, and Google Drive,” Sadalgi indicated. “We have learned – initially to our surprise – that customers often have multiple platforms. That’s because preferences are different throughout an organization. Engineer teams may prefer one type and sales and marketing another. We can support all these vendors, although we have been working with DropBox a lot, and now have a particularly strong relationship with them.”

Sadalgi said that DropBox’s new BetterCloud for Dropbox offer further consolidates that relationship, and that while it is obviously a very big deal for BetterCloud, as the smaller company, it also has significant advantages for DropBox.

BetterCloud for DropBox  features On-Demand Workflows and Time-Based Roles. The On-Demand workflows let Dropbox admins run customizable, automated sequences of Dropbox admin actions directly from the Users and Files grids of BetterCloud, using BetterCloud’s built-in filtering and bulk options to easily target the right set of users or files, and run workflows on many users at once. Time-based roles give Dropbox admins access to BetterCloud only at specific times, ensuring that access to govern Dropbox data is turned on only when necessary and when it aligns with the least privilege model of security.

“BetterCloud for DropBox isn’t designed as a limited-time offer,” Sadalgi said. “For the foreseeable future it’s something we will keep.”