Carbonite Details Strategy After Acquiring Mozy from Dell

Carbonite as part of an effort to broaden its portfolio of data protection offerings has agreed to acquire the Mozy cloud service from Dell Technologies for $185.4 million in cash.

The goal is to expand the portfolio of data protection software and services Carbonite provides to increase upsell opportunities for channel partners, says Norman Guadagno, senior vice president of marketing for Carbonite.

Mozy, which was originally acquired by EMC before it, in turn, was acquired by Dell to form Dell Technologies, has been mainly focused on providing data protection services to small businesses. Carbonite views the current base of 35,000 customers as a ripe opportunity for the channel. Most of the Mozy customer base consists of small businesses.

“This is about cross sell and up sell opportunities for our partners,” says Guadagno.

The decision to acquire Mozy comes at a time when investments in data protection to counter cybersecurity threats such as ransomware have increased considerably. The only real defense against ransomware that encrypts data is to be able to recover a pristine copy of the data affected.

Guadagno says high profile ransomware attacks have moved data protection much higher up the priority stack for most business leaders, which in turn is creating opportunities for solution providers to provide multiple classes of data protection solutions.

To facilitate that process Guadagno says Carbonite has been investing in developing a common management framework that can be employed against its entire portfolio of products and services. As part of that effort, Carbonite is also gearing up to make available a complete disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) platform later this year, says Guadagno.

Data protection has been an issue for the better part of three decades or more. Despite all the products and services available in that time, however, organizations still struggle with fundamental backup and recovery. Now there is more data to protect than ever. The good news is that cloud services create an opportunity to make backing up and archiving data more cost-effective. The challenge and opportunity facing solution providers now is combining the right mix of technologies to service customers data protection requirements that are becoming more complex with each passing day.