Dropbox has spent the past couple of years focusing on its business tier. Those efforts are off to a good start as more than 150,000 companies are currently using its premium service. On Tuesday, the San Francisco-based file hosting service turned its attention to another sector that's ripe for growth: education.

Jason Katcher, Dropbox's director of education, notes in a recent blog post that his company is now deployed in over 4,000 educational institutions around the globe. As more have joined the fray, Dropbox learned more about their specific needs and the new Dropbox Education tier was born.

The new offering is quite similar to the Business tier albeit at a discount. Pricing starts at $49 per user, per year with a minimum of 300 users although Dropbox is open to the idea of working with smaller teams. There's also volume pricing should you need additional licenses.

Dropbox Education offers 15GB of shared storage for each user. Using the minimum 300 users as an example, that'd result in 4.5TB of storage that's shared between all users. The plan also includes the ability to recover deleted files within a year of deletion and grants access to older versions.

Dropbox Education can also help institutions comply with common standards and regulations such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, among others.

Those interested in learning more are encouraged to visit the Dropbox Education landing page.