It's also worth noting that Google Drive is particularly well integrated with Gmail. If you're sent an attachment, it can be saved to your Google Drive with a single click or edited right away in the browser.
Google Apps for Work
In a similar vein to OneDrive for Business, Google has a Drive for professional users as part of the Google Apps for Work package. This ups the storage to 30GB to be shared between Drive and Gmail for $5 per month (exc VAT) or to "unlimited" for $10 a month although businesses with fewer than five users using the same domain are limited to 1TB. Unlike One Drive and One Drive for Business, however, you cannot have personal and work accounts synchronised on the same PC you have to choose one or the other.
There were no significant performance differences between the consumer and professional versions of Drive in our tests: files synced at roughly the same speeds. However, the Drive in Apps for Work does offer some features that will appeal to IT administrators, such as the options to set a minimum password strength, enforce device encryption and other mobile device security measures.
Admins can also prevent files being stored in Drive from being shared with anyone outside of the company domain, and transfer ownership of files from one person in the company to another, easing the handover when someone leaves the company, for instance.
This review was originally published on 23/02/15 but has been updated several times (most recently on 24/03/15)
Verdict
In our view, Google Drive is best suited to those wedded to the Google ecosystem, only really coming into its own if your company uses Gmail or relies on Google apps. For those who do most of their work in the traditional Microsoft Office apps, it has considerably weaker appeal – not least because of the browser compatibility problems with Office files. Performance is a little snappier after the initial device sync, but for those in the Windows world, we see few compelling reasons to trade OneDrive for Google’s offering.
