Iron Mountain Acquires Fontis International of Denver, CO

Iron Mountain Inc. has acquired Fontis International, Inc. of Denver, CO, a provider of a cloud-based subscription service for records retention guidelines.

Iron Mountain will now offer capabilities for continuously updating retention schedules that can be distributed in a fully-automated manner.

Fontis’ offering helps organizations better manage the storage and destruction lifecycle of their records according to industry and geographic laws and regulations, enabling compliance and legal defensibility for their information management programs.

As part of the acquisition, Fontis’ president Steve Formica and CTO Matt Hillery will join Iron Mountain to lead sales and product development for this service and technology-based offering.

Additional terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Most enterprises struggle to keep up with guidelines for retention (how long to keep records for legal or business reasons), relying on manual, time-intensive and often error-prone processes to research, update and communicate changes to policies. In response, they often default to a ‘store everything’ approach that can increase their risk of non-compliance, drive up storage costs, and make it difficult to respond to discovery requests during litigation. Holding records for too long and failing to follow retention guidelines also can hold back the expected benefits of an information management program, making it difficult to mine those records for insights into the business that can deliver real, bottom-line value.

Fontis’ cloud-based subscription service allows Iron Mountain to deliver automated, up-to-date retention guidelines from around the world that are researched, curated and vetted by legal experts within individual industries and geographies. Organizations can update their retention schedule via Fontis’ online interface, and then publish it so that those guidelines can be communicated to all employees across the enterprise – removing one of the biggest barriers to achieving defensible compliance. Organizations can feel secure that they are retaining their records according to policy, giving them the opportunity to cut costs by destroying information in a timely manner and controlling storage spend by keeping only what they need.

“True information management is built on fundamental pieces, building blocks that can mean the difference between effective programs and those not quite good enough,” said Blaine Rigler, SVP of global solutions, Iron Mountain. “One of those essential pieces is a records retention schedule that details the guidelines you need to follow, as well as the ability to communicate them as part of your policy to the organization. This acquisition helps us strengthen that piece, ensuring our customers are continuously informed of actionable changes to regulations that impact their information. They can get away from the task of making periodic, manual updates, feeling confident that their policy is up-to-date and vetted by geography and industry, with the added advantage of being able to communicate those changes across the enterprise. It fits perfectly with our current solutions and our goal to provide those building blocks for complete, holistic information management to our customers for today and the future.”

“We’re excited to join Iron Mountain,” said Steve Formica. “We created our products to serve as single sources of truth for managing compliance with the myriad of regulations that information managers face every day. Bringing that capability to Iron Mountain is a natural fit, a strong brand with deep roots and expertise, and we look forward to helping the company deliver on its vision for complete information management.”

More on the Iron Mountain’s solutions for managing retention and policy