The number of cloud storage providers has increased dramatically over the last couple of years. Many attract new users by offering free storage in hopes that users of the free services will convert to paying customers. While selling services to more consumers is great, enterprise customers are really the key to continued profitability and growth. This has sent many cloud providers like Box.net racing to attract more businesses.

What’s New at Box

Box, which already claims 82 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, has announced it is adding several new features designed to make enterprise administration easier. Box has enhanced its administrative controls, added new mobile security settings, added activity logging and now supports multiple email domains. These features address the two core issues that make some companies hesitant to leverage public cloud storage: administrative control and security.

The upgrades to the administrative panel allow admins to search across the enterprise for content. This improves admin visibility to files and makes securing content more efficient. In addition to the new search feature, Box gave a nod to enterprise consumerization and improved the ability to secure mobile devices. Admins can now require passcodes and restrict saving files on mobile devices to reduce the risk of data loss. Box has also added activity logging and notifications for organizations that must comply with eDiscovery or other compliance regulations. The notifications allow admins to integrate Box activity data with existing monitoring systems.

It will be interesting to see if the new enterprise focused features give Box a boost in business customers now that major platform vendors and traditional enterprise providers like HP, Rackspace and VMWare have entered the market. Although Box is a new comer, it has the advantage of being smaller and more nimble than many traditional players. This allows the company to be more responsive and add features quickly to meet customer demands.

Box plans to release the new features into beta on May 29. However, only users participating in the beta program will see the new features. Box is also holding a webinar, “Box Updates – Secure Enterprise Collaboration,” on June 7 at 10 am PST. The webinar will be led by the head of Enterprise Product Marketing and address how companies can use Box’s new features to securely manage their enterprise content.