Can EMC convince you to do online data backups?

How do you deal with backing up your data, especially when you're out on the road with your laptop? With today's announcement of EMC's MozyEnterprise, you can now encrypt, back up, and store your laptop or desktop PC data in a high security data center for not much more than $5 per month.

MozyEnterprise might finally be enough to convince even the most reluctant home users, small businesses, and enterprises that online backup and storage over the Internet is a safe, effective and maybe even necessary way to go, according to some industry analysts.

Built around Mozy technology gained by EMC through its $76 million acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems (BDS), EMC's new MozyEnterprise SAAS (software-as-a-service) offering will be deployed as a subscription-based service from an EMC-hosted data center for delivering back-up to laptops, desktop PCs, and corporate servers.

The pricing might act as another very effective motivator. For laptop and desktop PCs, the service costs just $5.25 per month, along with 70 cents per month for each gigabyte stored. Monthly pricing for servers is $9.25, in addition to $2.35 per gigabyte stored.

But although online back-up has been available for many years as an alternative to portable, desktop, and corporate backup devices, most of the early providers were basically unknown start-ups who didn't tend to inspire much widespread confidence, even among consumers, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, in an interview today with BetaNews.

BDS, on the other hand, changed all that by coming up with the original Mozy, a system widely seen as so secure that it had attracted some 500,000 users -- including big organizations such as General Electric and Vanderbilt University -- by the time of the EMC buyout last September.

"Now, EMC's ownership of Mozy really puts a 'seal of approval' on the system for enterprise customers," King told BetaNews.

EMC's MozyEnterprise Service rolls together three BDC backup products -- MozyHome, MozyPro and MozyEnterprise -- while also adding several new security technologies contributed by EMC, including RSA authentication, authorization, and key management.

Meanwhile, more individuals and companies are actually coming to grips with the real need to perform regular data back-ups, even for trivial-seeming small laptops, according to King.

"There's some very critical data running on some of those laptops today," King said, pointing to a rash of horrific tales over the past few years about information lost forever -- or, at least, potentially exposed to the wrong people -- when a laptop goes MIA (missing in action).

Fears of outside data and application hosting are likewise starting to fade away, particularly with the success of SaaS practitioners such as Salesforce.com, the analyst told BetaNews.

And although EMC's corporate messaging might have been clearer on this particular point, Verizon Business -- a major name in data hosting, if not specifically in SaaS -- will be reselling rather than hosting EMC's MozyEnterprise.