Google has unlimited resources to put behind its cloud storage solution, Google Drive, and Dropbox has solidified itself as a go-to option for cloud support. But Box believes it has a new competitive advantage in the form of speed, this morning unveiling Box Accelerator, a service that will speed up data upload speeds by a factor of ten.
Box users will be glad to learn that uploads that would normally take 60 minutes of your time will be reduced down to just six minutes. It’s great news for the 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies whose de facto cloud storage service is Box, not to mention a boon for the everyday, non-corporate users.
To enable this under the hood, Box now has 10 network endpoints (data centers) scattered throughout the world in every continent except for Africa. With the help of Amazon Web Service’s EC2 and Box’s own infrastructure, for example, users in Europe can now have their data shuttled to straight to Box’s Amsterdam servers. Box users in Boston will likely have their data uploaded to its New York servers, instead of its Chicago servers. Box’s new technology and infrastructure cuts the distance that your uploads would have to physically travel, and no longer requires data to be sent directly to its headquarters in California or its other two servers, which are thousands of miles away for many users.
With their proprietary technology to boot, Accelerator can determine the fastest route possible to reach each endpoint by monitoring the speed, location, operating system, and browser preferences. The data uploaded is also protected en route by a secure encryption. But with the admission that Amazon EC2 is being utilized, it’s likely that Box is currently using Amazon Transfer to speed up data transfers between zones.
Box is admittedly fast. A third-party independent testing service has corroborated the speed with which Box uploads data. Box’s average upload time in six of seven locations for 25MB of data was found to be 15.7 seconds, which is 2.7 times faster than the time it takes to upload data onto Google Drive. The study included Dropbox and Skydrive as well.
With $125 million in additional funding announced in late July, the company is working on setting up additional data centers throughout the world, which should speed up upload times even faster internationally. Soon Accelerator will also be capable of boosting upload speeds on Box Sync through its desktop and mobile apps.
You can watch the video explaining Box Accelerator below.
