Of employees using file sync and share tools at work, 89% are using consumer products, and only 9% of the information workers using this technology are satisfied with the commercial offering given to them by the corporate IT department, according to global analyst firm Ovum.

Ovum’s 2014 global employee survey of 5,187 full-time employees indicates that today’s digital workforce is sticking with familiar consumer tools to share corporate documents and access them from mobile devices. 

Ovum’s survey data suggests that 29% of employees using the technology are using three or more consumer and/or commercial products to get work done, while 44% of the workforce is not using file sync and share products at all – relying on email and memory sticks to shuttle data around.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum, commented: “These figures paint an anarchic picture of file sharing and document-centric collaboration within the workplace, and support Ovum’s thesis that while there may be an enterprise file sync and share solution to address almost every business need, there is no product that meets them all.”

The report – Selecting an Enterprise File Sync and Share Product – assesses 19 offerings from vendors including Box, Citrix, Dropbox, Egnyte, EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and WatchDox.

“No commercial product is dominating the workplace,” says Edwards. “The wide-scale use of Dropbox among knowledge workers highlights the power and impact of IT consumerisation, while the pervasiveness of Google Drive and Apple iCloud demonstrates the effects that mobile devices are having on the enterprise. And of course Microsoft is omnipresent in this market too.”

The number of products listed in this report is indicative of the range of vendors that are targeting this important market, and each appears to have something unique to offer. 

“As always, the challenge for CIOs and IT managers is to identify the solution that best meets the organisation's current and future requirements, with regard to a broad set of employee roles and business use cases. Herein lies the problem, as no single product on the market today offers everything that a large enterprise is likely to need.” concludes Edwards