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| image credit to ZDNet |
The most important criterion of any cloud storage service is its security. You are probably going to use the cloud service to store some very important files related to your business. You naturally need high level of security for such classified data.
The good news is that Dropbox has enabled two-step verification to its file storage service, making the service extremely secure.
What Is Two-Step Verification
Two-Step authentication can add security to any web-based service that you access from your client computer. Especially in services like online file storage, cloud computing, and email, you have to have better security.
We have seen people getting their accounts hacked into even after using strong passwords. The reasons for this are many—accessing the account from an unsecure system; having no proper security software installed; social engineering techniques that make people divulge such information to possible attackers; using security question answers that anybody can easily guess; writing down passwords and storing them in unsecure places; etc.
With Two-Factor verification, even if you lose your password, you will still be able to access your account—more importantly, anyone that actually gets hold of your password still needs additional information to access your account. The additional information mentioned here could be a secret code you can receive through text message on the mobile phone verified with the service.The attacker will be able to change the cell phone number and the password only if he gets access to the account, which he cannot without getting access to the cell phone. This, sort of puts our attacker in a catch-22 situation, only that he can actually get into the account if he can get into your cell phone.
With two-factor authentication procedure, you are given a second chance when your account password is compromised. If you come to know that your password is known to others and your one chance to recapture your account is by getting access with a secret code that you get through your cell phone and changing the password afterwards, you will preserve your cell phone at any cost, won’t you? Google also provides two layers of security, and you should enable it. Dropbox’s move to enable this makes it one of the first choices in file storage.
Enabling Two-Factor Authentication on Dropbox
You can tell Dropbox to send you a secret code by SMS or run a mobile app available for all operating systems out there—Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, etc. The mobile app supplied include Google Authenticator for Android, Apple iOS, and BlackBerry; Amazon AWS MFA for Android; or Authenticator for Windows Phone 7.
You can set up the SMS authentication using a cell phone number and the service is available internationally. Go to this link to enable Two-step authentication. You can set it up under your account settings page -> security tab.
After enabling it, you will get a one-time password every time you sign into Dropbox, and you cannot get access to your account without entering this secret code.
Conclusion
As you can see how secure it has to be to manage important user files, Dropbox probably will become the first choice of most of the people out there who are looking for good cloud storage services. The only disadvantage of this service is the lower free storage limit and the limit placed on the size of individual files. The free storage available in the server is 2 GB and the limit on file is around 300 MB. I would also suggest that you enable two-step verification on your Google account if you are seriously using it for various services.