In recent years, Box Inc. has expanded upon its platform’s core file-sharing capabilities by adding tools spanning areas such as security and analytics. But the company can’t tick every box on its own, which is why it provides integrations with external services to round out the native feature set.

Box today previewed two new integrations at BoxWorks, its San Francisco user conference. The first, aimed at enterprise security teams, is a connector that the company is building with Splunk Inc. to make it easier to stop data breaches.

Box has a built-in security tool called Box Shield that can regulate access to sensitive files and detect suspicious activity. Splunk, in turn, provides an analytics platform that is widely used among enterprise security teams for breach investigations. The planned integration will let Box Shield feed security alerts into Splunk, thus enabling administrators to evaluate potential data breaches through the same interface they use to investigate issues with other applications.

The companies’ long-term plans go even further. They’re preparing a second connector that will allow Box Shield to respond to certain threats without any human input by connecting to Phantom, a security automation system Splunk launched last year.

Adobe Inc. is another major industry player currently collaborating with Box to make their products work better together. The focus is on Adobe’s market-leading Acrobat suite of PDF tools. An upcoming integration will let workers use Acrobat to create, format, edit and sign PDF documents directly in the Box interface, while an accompanying change log will record the activity around each file.

These capabilities represent the second batch of updates Box announced this week. Yesterday the company unveiled new security features for Box Shield plus improved compatibility with Microsoft Teams and Slack.

The announcements are aimed at fleshing out the market segment Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie (pictured) has staked out: cloud content management. During his BoxWorks keynote, Levie noted the advent of big changes in work at large enterprises, including managing processes that depend on people inside and outside an organization and cloud-based tools for collaboration, that Box is aiming to facilitate.

Archrival Dropbox Inc. has also been working to make its file-sharing platform work better with popular enterprise cloud applications. In the past six months alone, the company has introduced connectors for G Suite, the Zoom videoconferencing platform and a half-dozen other tools.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE