Performance, reliability, availability, quality, security of the offerings or service level agreements (SLA’s)—these aspects define the business model of file sharing enterprises like Dropbox and Carbonite. Any disparity between their approaches will be just as interesting as the aftermath of any issues. Likewise, any challenges encountered within these parameters would mean disaster in a single snap. The beauty of comparing these two services will help flesh out the details on back-up economics and the business models they run along.

To view the comparison empirically: Carbonite is the traditional file-sharing company, while Dropbox exhibits the modern business paradigm. There are various angles that would fittingly separate the one from the other. These include the financial details, cost of a customer, customer lifetime value, “freemium,” rate of conversion, cost of service and development leveraging.

While Dropbox may not be known as a hardcore back-up business, its recent updates on personal cloud have proved its service to be a potential threat to the more established Crabonite. Its version 1.0 carried serious improvements from response time to scale and resource consumption. Dropbox is also capitalizing on free premiums and would opt to use referral and incentivizing it as a mode of advertising and marketing. Another big reveal is that Dropbox stores one million files every 5 minutes.

On the other hand, Carbonite’s IPO reveals high-end ad spending per customer. In fact, its conventional way of promoting its product and services is costly, bringing about $91.68 per customer. Whereas, Dropbox can get the same job done with just $0.015 a month.

In his article read on Wikibon.org, David Cahill made a conclusive statement saying, “The consumer/SMB data protection market is evolving to one that is driven by experience, with users much less concerned about the definition of the approach. And while services like Dropbox are still quite new, they have rapidly achieved real scale in a very short period of time. It will be very interesting to watch as Dropbox now looks to evolve and monetize this core footprint with enhanced services. Meanwhile Carbonite, under even greater pressure to respond, surely can’t stand still. If nothing else, going public will force it to realign its business with the current market realities faster.”

Perhaps, the biggest challenge that Dropbox and file-sharing industry is now facing is security issues. This particular facet is where even giants like Google and Apple are still struggling, if not fail. Apparently Dropbox is dealing with investigations on misleading customers on security and skepticism following the security breach that almost jeopardizes the files of their over 25 million customers.