Iron Mountain Extends Enterprise Online Backup to Macs

A recent Yankee Group global survey contends that the use of Macs in the enterprise is on the rise. The researcher reported that approximately 80 percent of all businesses have Macs and the OS X operating system installed in their networks.

Hmmm. That seems a bit high to me, but I’ll give the Yankees the benefit of the doubt. It is true that more and more people I know — tired of hassling with cheaper, less efficient PCs — are buying Mac desktops or MacBooks for both business and personal use.

Thus it behooves companies to protect business data through the use of online backup and recovery with enterprise-grade protection to support all platforms.

In answer to this apparent mandate, Iron Mountain announced Jan. 5 at Macworld here in San Francisco that its Connected Backup solution will become available in March for Mac users.

Iron Mountain‘s service provides businesses of any size with the ability to protect corporate data, regardless of computer platform, through secure online data recovery.

Connected Backup with Mac support provides the same features as Iron Mountain’s Connected Backup for PC, which includes automatic backup without user interruption or IT intervention, and promises an end to data loss from viruses, misplaced or stolen laptops, data corruption and user error. It also gives IT control of secure backup and restoration both inside and beyond company firewalls.

Furthermore, it enables an IT department to centrally manage distributed data backup from Mac or PC laptops outside of the office. Users on PCs or Macs can retrieve lost or damaged files without help desk support with “anytime/anywhere” system rollback, even when users are away from the office. Also, Iron Mountain’s patented data reduction technologies — aka deduplication — can reduce storage capacity needs by up to 85 percent, the company claims. (Your own experience may vary.)

I’d like to hear from eWEEK readers about this. Are you using a Mac desktop or laptop for work purposes? Are you finding any barriers to using a Mac at the office?

Is the day finally here when a business user can select any desktop or laptop he or she prefers? Hope so.