The top cloud storage providers are aggressively expanding their feature sets in a bid to better accommodate the growing amounts of data that companies are moving off-premise. Last week, Dropbox Inc. set the pace by introducing team folders for its historically consumer-focused service to ease the sharing of business information.

Access to a team folder can be centrally controlled by an organization’s IT department to ensure that only authorized users are able to view and modify its contents. Dropbox also provides the option of applying custom usage rules to every sub-folder, which is useful when sensitive data is involved. An accounting department, for instance, might want to prevent different units from checking one another’s financial spreadsheets. The functionality was announced alongside an improved management console that makes it possible to log downloads and file deletions for security purposes.

The additions should make Dropbox much more appealing to CIOs, but it’s still facing an uphill battle against Box Inc., which has an iron grip on the enterprise file sharing market. The company cemented its position last week by rolling out new commenting and text highlighting functionality for the embedded version of its platform. As a result, developers that want to embed its service into their projects will now be able to provide users with a much more complete feature set than before. And that in turns means that Box’s third party application ecosystem, already one of its main strengths, is set to become an even bigger selling point.

While Box and Dropbox were duking it out, Google bought LaunchKit Inc., a San Francisco startup focused on automating mobile application development. It has built a set of cloud-based tools for measuring app performance, monitoring reviews and designing promotional graphics. The search giant plans to shut down the services and absorb the startup’s team into its development tool business following the deal, but users aren’t being abandoned. LaunchKit released the code for its tools in conjunction with the acquisition announcement to let developers continue using them at no charge.

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