EMC’s Mozy brings cloud storage to biz, consumers

30 Apr 2010

An online storage facility that allows computer owners – both business and consumer – to backup all kinds of data, from spreadsheets to videos and photos – has gone live across Europe.

Mozy, a subsidiary of storage giant EMC, is the world’s most trusted online backup service for consumers and small businesses.

The service is used by more than 1.3m people worldwide, including 50,000 businesses, and 25 petabytes of information are stored at its multiple and highly secure data centres worldwide.

Russ Stockdale, chief marketing officer of Mozy, explained that the company, originally established in Utah, is only five years old but has already proven itself invaluable to private individuals, mobile professionals, digital hobbyists, freelance professionals, business owners and entrepreneurs.

Mozy offers a number of online backup solutions to fit individual needs. For non-commercial backup of personal files, including music, photos, home videos, financial records and personal documents, MozyHome is the most suitable product. For small businesses looking to backup business data, financials and administrative files for a handful of users, MozyPro is the best solution.

Mozy’s backup solutions

MozyHome offers unlimited backup for personal home users covering all file types, from family photos to financial documents, with the same military-grade encryption used by online banks for €4.99 per month. Customers who purchase an annual contract pay €54.89 and are given one month of free service. With a biennial contract, customers are given three months of free service, for a total cost of €104.79.

MozyPro offers unlimited, automated and easily managed multi-user online backup for SoHo and small businesses, pay-as-you-go, with no set-up costs. Complete security assurance for €3.99 per computer per month + 50c per GB. Server licences cost €6.99 per month + 50c per GB.

Accounts can be billed monthly, annually, or biennially (every two years) and customers can get one month free when they sign up for an annual account or three months free with a biennial subscription.

“Whether you’re a consumer or a small business, for us we see a common scenario across those two domains. You don’t have an IT guy to take care of problems. You have a business to run and the same is also true for the consumer. The fact is in both cases there’s a lot of valuable digital content you wish to preserve,” Stockdale explained.

“Devices like desktops and laptops come and go and rarely politely inform you when that moment comes, so what happens to your digital backup? Also, if you’re a mobile professional you may want to access a particular document on the road.

“Mozy is easy to use and quick to set up. The average computer user can do this. Once its set up the system is automated and can take care of files and back everything up from there on in.

“We believe it is important that when entrusted to us, it is vital that we provide a safe and secure storage service that is in a format that is inaccessible to other parties. We will encrypt the data at point and then send that over an encrypted link to our data centre where it is stored in an encrypted format available to only you.”

Mozy demonstration

With Stockdale at a demonstration of the technology was Damien O’Halloran, EMEA tech support manager for Mozy. He demonstrated how users can have a free Mozy account with storage up to 2Gb. Beyond that near unlimited storage costs €4.99.

“In terms of encryption, we provide a 448-bit encryption key which is more secure than the industry standard 256-bit AES encryption key. When setting this up, a configuration wizard pre-selects backup types. The service lets you do other things, too. For example, if you are a Firefox user you can store all your favourites and control the sets of data you want backed up.”

According to Stockdale, mobile professionals across the US use Mozy to log in from anywhere over the internet to backup files and retrieve files. “The service can also be automated to do scheduled backups without any user intervention and you can rest easy at night knowing that your data is safe and secure.”

By John Kennedy

Photo: (above) A look at the MozyHome backup solution and (below) Russ Stockdale, CMO, Mozy with Damien O’Halloran, EMEA tech support manager for Mozy

Mozy

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com