Mozy for the Mac Goes Pro

Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Time Machine is great for incremental on-site backups, but what happens if there's a theft, fire, or flood? Mac owners facing such a disaster can wave goodbye to the Time Capsule and prepare to start from scratch -- unless there's a remote backup solution in play, of course.

Earlier this year, Mozy, a branch of EMC (NYSE: EMC) that provides online backup, launched its first backup service for Apple aficionados, MozyHome for Mac. While it's great for saving the family photo album, it wasn't exactly set up to handle the heavy payloads associated with a burgeoning Mac-based business.

The company has now introduced a beta version of MozyPro for Mac, designed to facilitate online data storage for businesses running Mac-based offices.

"We're building upon the success that we had with our MozyHome for Mac offering back in May. We had many of those customers immediately ask us, 'When are you going to have a business version?'" Steve Fairbanks, Mozy's director of product management, told MacNewsWorld. In fact, 1,700 Mac owners contacted Mozy looking for a business version in the weeks following the launch, according to the company.

"We've been working furiously since then to come to market with the MozyPro for Mac offering," he added.

New Admin Console

"We're adding to the robustness of our Mac client that's already in the market by adding admin console capabilities that will let customers manage multiple of instances of Mozy in their Mac environment -- up to hundreds of installed instances," Fairbanks explained.

The new Web-based administration console lets customers provision new accounts, update and manage storage, set preferences and establish policies that can be rolled out to dozens or hundreds of Macs in the organization.

MozyPro also provides 24x7 phone support, network drive support, and support for popular server applications such as iCal Server, Mail Services and Directory on OS X Server and Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory on Windows Server.

Naturally, MozyPro for Mac includes new pricing as well.

Beta Release

It should be noted that MozyPro for Mac is launching in beta form first, though Fairbanks says it's already extremely robust. MozyPro for desktops and laptops is US$3.95 per license plus $.50 a GB per month. MozyPro for servers is $6.95 per license plus $0.50 per GB per month. MozyPro supports Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X Server, along with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server.

On the home front, MozyHome is available for free up to 2 GB and $4.95 a month for unlimited online capacity.

Mac on the Rise

As Apple has been gaining market share by leaps and bounds each quarter, it should come as no surprise that demand for Mac-based solution and services is also on the rise. Currently, more than 20 percent of its customers that sign up for services are signing for the Mac offering, Fairbanks said, which represents a higher percentage of interest than the general industry-wide Mac market share would suggest.

"We've seen a great surge in customers signing up for a Mac offering," Fairbanks noted.

Hanging by a Thread

Of Mozy's 900,000 PC and Mac-based customers, 25,000 are small businesses, and small businesses, it turns out, are often at the most risk if they suffer a data loss.

"Numerous small businesses, if they can't recover their data within a very short period of time, end up filing for bankruptcy," Fairbanks said, noting that according to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93 percent of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50 percent filed for bankruptcy immediately.

Ouch.