News

posted on 12 June 2008 08:13

Not content with virtualising the data centre and rewriting NetBackup for the disk world, Symantec has bought its way into consumer storage in the cloud services.

It has bought SwapDrive in a quiet transaction for about $123 million. SwapDrive, founded in 1998, offers consumers the facility to have their files automatically backed up to a SwapDrive in-the-sky storage cloud using telco-grade disk drives and its subsidiary company, backup.com. This, it says, is the pioneer online backup service. It has more than 2 million users and stores billions of files.

Once a customer's files are in SwapDrive's cloud they are backed up again making data loss 'virtually impossible' - SwapDrive's terminology.

The transmitted data can be encrypted and users can restore their own files using a web interface. Software installation is a snap and users get to protect, preserve and share their files. It's a Mozy and Carbonite-type service.

SwapDrive also offers a cloud-based file sharing service via a second subsidiary operation, WhaleMail.com. Once a file is uploaded e-mails are sent to potential sharers giving thema URL for the uploaded file.

Symantec is putting the acquired company into its Norton consumer division and we might expect to soon hear about its 'Norton SwapDrive' service. Norton 360 has an online storage option and SwapDrive has operated this since 2006.

Symantec says: "With the completion of the SwapDrive acquisition, we are building a solid foundation upon which to offer our Norton customers a comprehensive solution to help secure and manage all of their digital information, across all of their devices."

The acquistion is part of an industry rend as big storage suppliers get into cloud storage services: EMC bought Mozy; IBM has bought Arsenal; Iron Mountain has bought LiveVault and Connected; Seagate has its EVault operation; and Microsoft has SkyDrive.

So there it is; Symantec has signalled it is going to be a cloud storage services player too and thus that it's going to spend millions of dollars building out a world-wide storage data farm structure. It remains to be seen whether Symantec will take this up the business tree from consumers and SOHO businesses into SME and enterprises.

^{[Peter Roberts, news editor.]}