New Kiwi Cloud Tool Movebot A Big Game-changer

A new Christchurch tech company has designed a New Zealand-first game-changing cloud migration tool, Movebot, which can shift massive amounts of data, a bit like moving a house or an office, safely and quickly.

Movebot was conceived during the covid-19 lockdown so it could help businesses, organisations and people move their data to where they want it.

It was developed under the leadership of Michael Lawson, who co-founded Linewize, an internet safety company keeping Kiwi kids safe online. Linewize provides a cloud-managed firewall service specifically developed for the education sector.

Australian cyber safety vendor Family Zone bought Linewize, as part of its continuing expansion in the education sector, in a deal worth $16.5 million.

Lawson's inspiration for Movebot was to build a solution that makes file transfer with the cloud, really simple and safe for everyone.

Movebot is powered by parent company Couchdrop and it migrates cloud data from one storage provider to another, regardless how big the data load is.

“Movebot is that safe pair of hands that takes care of all the heavy lifting for our clients. Often businesses or users have heaps of data from a few giga bytes to hundreds of terabytes that they have acquired over time and moved to the cloud.

“So, when they decide they need to move from one provider to another, such as Dropbox to Google Drive, Movebot can do the work four times cheaper than established providers.

“Moving large amounts of data is not that simple and takes weeks or months depending on the volume and resources available.

“What Movebot does is this move quicker as well as safely in the cloud without tying up resources from the customers perspective - thereby making it a more convenient solution. What may take some suppliers of these services three weeks we can do in a few days.

“Over time from a business perspective, teams and individuals create and keep huge amounts of data such as documents, photos, music and videos, this can be on their own computers or servers but often it is saved in the cloud with one of the many cloud providers.

“As businesses evolve, or in the case of covid-19 and other disasters, they find that their current storage solution does not meet their needs anymore.

“The recognised cloud platforms are safe but moving the data between them can be risky if the user makes a mistake in the process. That’s’ what we mean by a safe pair of hands.

“Movebot enables companies to choose the best cloud platform for their needs and move between them, when they need to.

“Data sovereignty and privacy is a big issue these days, Movebot has invested in infrastructure in safe countries such as the US, the UK, Canada, Singapore and Australia. Unfortunately, New Zealand does not have any real cloud computing tech. Microsoft is planning to, but it will take some time to come to fruition.

“We already have customers in the US, Canada and the UK and we are particularly interested in New Zealand and Australia,” Lawson says.

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