Laptops and PCs at Grant Thornton U.S. Protected With Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected

Since 1999, Grant Thornton U.S. has depended on Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated, to back up and protect the critical business data stored on its laptops and PCs. As the Chicago-based accounting firm has grown and its workforce has doubled, so too has the need to protect company information residing on mobile workstations. Today all company laptops and PCs are protected with Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected Backup for PC solution, the leading Storage-as-as-Service offering for PC backup and recovery.

With an expanding workforce, where 90% of the 6,000 employees travel and work remotely — and its business information so distributed — it has become a critical requirement for each and every one of Grant Thornton’s growing fleet of notebooks and desktops to be fully protected in the event a consultant’s PC is lost, stolen or damaged beyond repair. Iron Mountain Digital continues to meet these demands and provide Grant Thornton with complete, online data protection and recovery, while also reducing the lengthy IT times and high costs once associated with the Company’s manual backups.

"In 1998, we conducted an extensive review of the online backup solutions available and found no other solution compared to the Connected Backup for PC solution and its ability to automatically heal any PC problem and protect data remotely," said David Johnson, director of information technology, Strategic Services for Grant Thornton. "It was only natural for us to select Iron Mountain Digital to help us convert what was once a fragmented and complex environment to a highly standardized, efficient and secure network. After nearly ten years, Iron Mountain Digital’s solution continues to be the best solution available today; providing us with world-class data protection and recovery services that help us reduce risk and internal costs and increasing productivity."

Within the first year, support costs were significantly reduced and Grant Thornton LLP was able to recover data from more than 300 notebooks which had been lost, stolen or damaged. The company also had hundreds of instances where users had system problems, application failures or overwritten their data. The self-healing feature and ability of users to restore their own data positively impacts IT support by reducing workload and enabling the company to maintain lean IT staffing levels. With the Connected Backup for PC solution, Grant Thornton has been able to maintain the same number of technicians who support the Connected solution, even ten years later.

"At Iron Mountain Digital, our Storage-as-a-Service model reduces the costs and risks associated with digital information management, while lessening the complexity of storing data for highly-regulated businesses of all sizes," said John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital. "We’re pleased to recognize that the flexibility and scalability of our Connected solution have continued to meet Grant Thornton’s needs over the course of our decade-long partnership. We look forward to working with Grant Thornton for many more years to come."

As the leader in Storage-as-a-Service, Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected solution provides customers with unmatched storage savings and reduces backup time. The Company’s patented data reduction and de-duplication technologies can reduce storage capacity requirements by more than 80 percent of data volume.