The University's central agreement with Dropbox ends on 7 June 2025. University Dropbox accounts will revert to free Dropbox Basic accounts with 2GB of storage when the licence ends.
What is Dropbox?
Dropbox is a secure, cloud-based file sharing and storage service.
Dropbox enables you to access your files from your computer, your mobile devices and the web, and easily share your files securely with others, whether or not they use Dropbox.
The Enterprise plan is built specifically for larger organisations and businesses that need custom, scalable solutions. Users also benefit from enhanced storage, sharing and collaboration tools.
What Dropbox gives you
- Each user gets 5TB of storage.
- Access to all your files, from anywhere, on any device.
- Seamless syncing across desktops and mobile devices.
- Easy file sharing with colleagues and partners.
- Enhanced security, including remote device wipe.
- App integrations: single sign-on integrations and API calls for data migrations.
- Admin management: access to tiered admins, which makes it easy to delegate team administration
- Real-time support: access to support agents over phone, chat or email.
Please note that it is not possible to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to log in to a University Dropbox account. Dropbox gives us a tenancy-wide choice between enabling single sign-on or MFA. At the University we are using single sign-on. Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to have both enabled at the same time.
How Dropbox compares with other storage services
You can find out more how Dropbox compares with other storage services we offer including OneDrive, SharePoint and Google Drive.
Find out more about file storage services
What you can store on Dropbox
You can store medium impact (level 2) data on Dropbox.
Dropbox is not suitable for:
- research data that has not been pseudonymised
- health data where individual patients are named or can be identified
- data that is subject to a specific contractual agreement that specifies a particular storage method (that is not Dropbox)
- data that is subject to a specific contractual agreement that prohibits storage in a public cloud service.
Find out more about data security classifications
What it costs
The University of Cambridge has a Master Dropbox Agreement, which provides access to the enterprise version of Dropbox. This agreement expires on 7 June 2025.
All staff, students and researchers within the University are welcome to access this agreement until the expiry date and can purchase a licence for storing work-related documents at a discounted rate. It currently costs £120 excluding VAT per year for each user.
The cost of each licence will be calculated on a pro-rata basis for the number of months remaining in the current year.
When the licence ends, your account will revert to a free Dropbox Basic account with 2GB of storage. Before the licence expires, you'll need to move data that exceeds the 2GB limit to one of our alternative services or upgrade your free Dropbox Basic account for additional storage. Please speak to your local IT team. The data will need to be housed in accordance with the University's information security policies.
Academia will not be able to offer trial periods or partial refunds if you cancel midway through your subscription.
How to access Dropbox
Our reseller partner, Academia, manages our Master Dropbox Agreement. To place an order, please visit their online store:
Get Dropbox from the Academia for Education Procurement Store
Get help using Dropbox
Dropbox's help site provides a wide range of useful step-by-step guides and tips for using the service.
Academia is now handling all account renewals, cancellations and general support queries. Please contact cambridge@academia.co.uk.