Organizations often adopt these technologies to prevent employees from using consumer-based file sharing apps to store, access and manage corporate data that is outside of the IT department's control and visibility.
[8] Box, one of the first EFSS products, was originally developed as a college project of Aaron Levie while he was a student of the University of Southern California in 2004.
Many were developed as alternatives to consumer file sync and sharing services that did not have security features in place to protect company information nor the flexibility to integrate with existing content repositories and business applications.
ShareFile was a competitor of Box and Dropbox but focused on selling its product to IT departments of large organizations.
[17] On June 25, 2014, Google announced at its I/O Conference that it was entering the enterprise file sharing market with the release of “Google Drive for Work.”[18][19] In July 2015, one EFSS vendor, Syncplicity, was sold to private equity firm, Skyview Capital, by previous owner, EMC Corporation.