One of the most obvious reasons that services such as Dropbox or Box are so popular with end users is that most internal IT organizations simply haven’t had a way to offer that capability. End users were acquiring mobile computing devices by the millions and they simply needed a way to share files.
The truth is most end users and IT professional alike would still prefer it if internal IT organizations could deliver this capability within a broader set of applications without requiring them to invoke a third-party service. In fact, it’s servicing that specific need that led to the formation of the ownCloud open source project, which created a file synchronization and collaboration server that internal IT organizations can deploy on their own.