Symantec announced today that Norton Online Backup software will be shipping with HP PCs and Laptops. Norton Online Backup is a cloud storage solution which can be used to backup your data on your PC.
Norton Online currently has about 32PB of consumer data and is growing by about 5PB/Qtr and is currently number one in online backup market. Also Norton online has about 8M users today growing 100% each year. With the HP announcement today all of these metrics will just increase even faster.
Consumers create over 70% of the worlds digital data with a 60% CAGR. Roughly about 2% of consumers use online backup services and ~25% of never backup at all. Norton Online Backup, EMC’s Mozy, Carbonite and others are attempting to entice these backup shy users to start backing up their data online and forgo onsite headaches of doing it yourself.
Apparently with Norton Online one can back up up to 5 machines and they can be located anywhere. So if you wanted to backup your kid’s pc at college and your parent’s pc at their retirement village you could do this with one Norton online license (as long as the total machine count < =5). Once backed up the data can be restored to any machine and takes just a few clicks. Backing up your pc is easy to setup and once done can be forgotten. Then whenever you are on the internet and the machine is not busy, the data just trickles out to the Norton Online backup service. The Norton Online Backup service is renewed yearly and cost is based on storage quantity backed up. How Symantec stores and records 32PB of user backup data is non-trivial but I am told it is all done using commodity hardware and commodity disk drives with nary a SAN in sight. They have multiple data centers, professionally managed, supporting Symantec developed/acquired cloud storage services. Apparently, Norton Online Backup is an outgrowth of Symantec's SwapDrive acquisition from last year. Symantec appears to be the leader in cloud storage applications and this would seem to be just the start of the services that Symantec will deploy via the cloud. Now if they only had something for the Mac... Technorati Profile
