Iron Mountain Takes Digital Archiving To Next Level

Current and emerging regulations, along with the need to archive important files but have them easily accessible, highlight the significant need for digital records management. Digital storage and management outsourcing service vendor Iron Mountain is leading the charge with its Digital Archives solution, a wide range of services that help companies meet their compliance and storage requirements.

E-mail is now one of the fastest-growing discovery requests in lawsuits. Naturally, the more e-mail traffic you have, the more difficult it becomes to control and monitor. Iron Mountain's digital service really shines when it comes to the way it archives, manages and protects e-mail. The digital service offers companies the ability to quickly retrieve and use e-mail records. It is also designed specifically to comply with new and emerging requirements from regulatory agencies.

VINCENT A. RANDAZZESE Assistant Technical Editor

When noncompliance problems do arise, unless the proper steps have been taken, digital records management can be a real challenge,not to mention a distraction.

The federal government is changing the way businesses conduct e-commerce with the passage of several e-document-centric regulations. In addition, health-care organizations must abide by HIPAA provisions, which regulate how patients' medical records are managed and communicated electronically.

Financial institutions, meanwhile, must adhere to both the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which aims to protect consumers' personal financial information held by financial institutions, and the USA Patriot Act, an antiterrorism bill that expands the government's authority over surveillance methods.

Iron Mountain's compliance expertise provides businesses with the assurance that their archived e-records meet all compliance requirements, while saving them money.

After years in the records and information management business, Iron Mountain launched its digital archiving service in November 2001. Content of any type, including scanned documents, e-mail, images, forms, audio and video, is stored in one of the company's 50 data centers located throughout the country and is accessible online.

Iron Mountain's data centers are designed to minimize significantly the potential for data loss. All of those centers are located away from earthquake faults, flood-prone areas, airport flight paths, high-crime areas, banks and shops that store or sell valuables. They're also located within 3 miles of police and fire stations, are based in commercially zoned areas rather than industrial, and are at least 2 miles from fuel storage tanks, chemical plants and rail lines. The centers are housed in single-story, windowless, steel-reinforced, earthquake-resistant concrete vaults with entrances protected by Class-5 steel vault doors.

To minimize the possibility of fire, Iron Mountain's data centers are never used for paper storage, although paper documents can be scanned and stored digitally in the centers. Each center is equipped with a Halon 1301 gaseous fire-suppression system, rather than water sprinklers, a 40 kVA UPS and a 230-kilowatt diesel backup generator. Two Liebert 10-ton air-conditioning units provide consistent environmental conditions, and server racks are seismically protected. The data centers also have state-of-the-art security systems to protect against theft.

Solution providers and their customers can enjoy a wide range of benefits when outsourcing their data-protection needs to Iron Mountain. Businesses can avoid having to make costly hardware and software infrastructure investments. Also, outsourcing a digital archive solution saves the customer from having to hire and train additional IT staff, fulfill retrieval requests, store and manage physical media (such as tapes or platters), preserve and migrate media, and oversee associated data center activities,all time-consuming and expensive tasks.

By outsourcing to Iron Mountain, customers pay only for the services they require. Outsourcing also opens up space a company would otherwise lease or purchase for the storage.

Iron Mountain's years of digital storage service, combined with the regulatory compliance management features built into its product, offer customers a low-cost, long-term solution that addresses the legal and business issues of archiving digital records that backup and storage solutions traditionally do not address.

CHANNEL PROGRAM SNAPSHOTS
> IRON MOUNTAIN DIGITAL ARCHIVES
PRICE: $Service fees are based on storage and follow a pay-as-you-go model
DISTRIBUTORS: Direct from vendor
TECH RATING:
CHANNEL RATING:

CHANNEL OVERVIEW: While it sells its Digital Archives solutions mostly direct, Iron Mountain, Boston, works with a limited number of 8(a) minority-owned or disadvantaged solution providers to target federal government contracts. Its solution providers in the government space work on a referral basis and get a percentage of the sales revenue. The vendor lacks an official channel program but works with partners case by case.

Note: Vendors can earn up to five stars for technical merit and five for their channel program. If the average of these two scores is four stars or greater, the product earns CRN Test Center Recommended status.

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