EMC Enhances Mozy Business

Cloud computing has quickly gained momentum in the storage space because many small and medium businesses do not want to deal with the hassle of backing up company data. EMC's Mozy has emerged as a popular service, and the company made some enhancements to maintain its market momentum.EMC's MozyPro 2.0 features several improvements. The company enhanced its storage algorithms, so they support faster upload speeds (by as much as 25%) and use less bandwidth. A new user interface is designed to simplify storage administration. In addition, businesses are now able to back up data to local external drives. Pricing for the service starts at $4.95 per month. Mozy was one of the first vendors to enter the online storage market. Initially, the service was designed for consumers, but the company enhanced it so it is now used by 50,000 businesses, including Alcoa, Autodesk, and Expedia.

Because online storage was becoming so popular, EMC acquired Mozy in October 2007. Since then, the company has tried to fine tune Mozy's business focus. The online storage supplier faces a great deal of competition in this space. Adrive, Box.net, Carbonite, Elephant Drive, and SugarSync are some of the companies trying to wedge their way into this space. With its installed base and EMC's backing, Mozy seems destined to remain a viable option in this pack.

Longer term, companies, such as Amazon and Google, are aggressively developing an array of cloud services and could become more significant players in the online storage space. If this occurs, they could present Mozy with significant challenges. So now, Mozy presents corporations with a viable online storage option, but longer term, the company could face more competition and more questions.