Consumer-Oriented Online Storage: Mozy vs. Carbonite
Sunday's Globe column looked at how Carbonite and Mozy are building the market for consumer-oriented online backup services. Carbonite is a Boston-startup funded first by CommonAngels; Mozy is a Utah start-up acquired by EMC in 2007.
From the piece:
To accompany the piece, there's an audio interview with Carbonite CEO David Friend, who talks about how hard it was to raise VC money for a consumer-oriented company in Boston.
Tom Kennedy, who does some communications consulting for Iron Mountain, pointed out to me that that Boston company also offers online PC backup. I should have included them, even though none of the reviews I could find of consumer back-up services mention their Connected Backup for PC offering. (Perhaps because its pricing is much higher than Carbonite's or Mozy's?)
From the piece:
Mozy and Carbonite are two of the leaders of the online backup business, a rare bright spot in a gloomy tech economy. Rather than buying their own hard drives to save a copy of their data, consumers and small businesses pay a fee (Mozy's is $59 a year, Carbonite's is $50) to send their information securely over the Net, and have Mozy or Carbonite keep a copy that can be retrieved any time. IDC, a Framingham research firm, predicts that online backup services will generate about $715 million in annual revenue by 2011.
The big question is whether a start-up like Carbonite, with 125 employees and $47 million in venture capital, can capture a bigger piece of that market, or whether a division of a big company like EMC will have the edge.
To accompany the piece, there's an audio interview with Carbonite CEO David Friend, who talks about how hard it was to raise VC money for a consumer-oriented company in Boston.
Tom Kennedy, who does some communications consulting for Iron Mountain, pointed out to me that that Boston company also offers online PC backup. I should have included them, even though none of the reviews I could find of consumer back-up services mention their Connected Backup for PC offering. (Perhaps because its pricing is much higher than Carbonite's or Mozy's?)
Labels: Carbonite, CommonAngels, David Friend, EMC, Iron Mountain, Mozy, online backup, storage
posted by Scott Kirsner at
9:30 AM
1 Comments:
Great post. Online back up is a bright spot in a challenging economy. Especially given so many companies in New England dedicated to addressing the storage challenge.
Iron Mountain appreciates you acknowledging our Connected Backup for PC. And while we do offer this as a personal solution, Connected Backup for PC is primarily aimed at businesses - from the small to the large enterprise.
Absolutely, I want my photos and personal documents to be safe, like most others I know. However, we think the bigger issue is: How are business of all sizes going to meet the data backup and recovery challenge given the vast amounts of data we are generating?
Storage-as-a-Service is a delivery model that makes a lot of sense for most companies, as it takes the burden of storage scalability off the organization and adds layers of security, compliance and accessibility that are simply too expensive for companies to maintain on their own.
Protecting information, ensuring compliance, and being able to recover almost immediately from disasters are vital to managing a business. If a company can't get up and running after an outage, or can't maintain the security of their customer information, their brand is irrevocably damaged and their costs become far greater than if they had just opted for the right data protection in the first place.
Karen McPhillips
Vice President, Worldwide Marketing
Iron Mountain Digital
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