Google Drive for Work Now with Unlimited Storage at US$10

With the announcement of Microsoft increasing its cloud storage service OneDrive, the global search engine Google also offers Google Drive for Work with unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls for businesses at US$10 per user per month.

According to a report by Box Free It, this is the first time a cloud file storage service offers unlimited storage at a very minimal price. However, a business should spend $50 per month to store an unlimited number of files, as Google Drive for Work accounts with less than five users are limited to 1 TB of storage per user.

In addition, The Verge reports Drive for Work will include enhanced administration controls to suit corporate environments and a set of APIs that will help administrators keep track of the work employees are doing.

Google has integrated its Quickoffice into Google Drive for Work so that businesses are capable of reading and editing Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on Android mobile devices as well as in the Chrome browser on a desktop or laptop. Google also mentions it will soon add the capability to iOS (iPhone and iPad) devices.

According to the company, Google Drive has 190 million users worldwide that have been active for 30 days or longer. Google adds that 58 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are now using Google services.

As mentioned earlier, Google Drive adds more control and security settings for businesses that want to know who shared which files and to whom. Users can share files up to 5 TB in size for others to view, edit and download.

Google Drive is well-suited with over 40 file formats and has the ability to preview videos, images, Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets and PDFs without the use of any extra software. Also, files are encrypted while transferring from a computer to Google Drive and remains encrypted while stored in the data centre.

Google is also planning to bring optical character recognition and image recognition to its search engine in order to identify words or images in PDFs or handwritten notes.

Google is providing full support to businesses who would want to make the shift to Google Drive for Work. Google's support team will be available 24/7 on email, phone and chat to help businesses process such a transition.