Look Out Box and Dropbox — Here Comes Amazon’s Zocalo

Amazon, a giant in the web retail industry, continues to diversify its portfolio and provide competition to cloud storage and collaboration businesses like Dropbox and Box in the enterprise sector. The new addition being Amazon’s service known as Zocalo, a product of the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit—the leading provider of on-demand computing power across the globe.

Zocalo presents itself as a “fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service.” It is decked out with administrative controls and feedback capabilities to boost user productivity. Zocalo allows users to safely store and easily share a variety of files and photos from any device anywhere. This marks yet another venture by Amazon into consumer-facing services, alongside WorkSpaces, its virtual desktop service.

What sets Zocalo apart is its compatibility with existing corporate directory services, eliminating the need for additional sign-in credentials. According to Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels, the conceptualization of this cloud storage and collaboration tool was motivated by feedback from users who found similar systems complicated. Vogels believes that Zocalo’s user-friendly model addresses this problem and enhances document and data management. It also offers an alternative to extensive email chains, thereby promoting better collaboration.

While there’s no denying that Zocalo’s main competition, Box and Dropbox, have distinguishing strengths, they now face formidable competition from Amazon’s new entry into the market. Amazon’s Zocalo stands out with its user-friendly interfaces and a robust suite of features. Box and Dropbox, however, continue to hold their ground in the face of Amazon’s challenge. Box acknowledges Amazon’s market entry, highlighting the consistent demand for scalable, high-security platforms that support a variety of systems. Meanwhile, Dropbox maintains a reliance on Amazon Web Service’s S3 file storage service, creating a fascinating competitor-customer dynamic.

Amazon’s foray into the enterprise file-sharing market has added diversity and intensified competition. The future will surely bring more changes in how these providers adapt, evolve, and shape the landscape of the enterprise file-sharing market.

Updated in 2025 to align with recent developments.