And Now “Cloud Archiving”, by Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated, announced the addition of Virtual File Store service to its robust Digital Archiving and Storage-as-a-Service portfolio. The Virtual File Store solution is an enterprise-class, cloud-based storage archiving service designed to help companies reduce costs of storing and managing static data files. As companies search for cost-effective solutions to manage massive amounts of digital information, Iron Mountain Digital’s Virtual File Store offers secure, long-term storage of inactive data at off-site data centers, greatly reducing the investment in an expensive on-site storage infrastructure and supporting regulatory and compliance initiatives.

"More than ever, companies are struggling to keep pace with rapid data growth and increased regulatory demand – often retaining enormous amounts of data ‘just in case’ they need it down the road," said John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital. "Given that 50 to 60 percent of corporate data is inactive, storing all that data in-house is not a sustainable storage strategy for companies today that are faced with soaring storage costs and shrinking IT budgets. The enterprise-class Virtual File Store service directly addresses this problem by freeing up precious storage resources, while ensuring inactive data is secure and easily accessible."

The key benefits of the Virtual File Store service include:

• No Large Capital Investment Required – Because the Virtual File Store service is integrated with existing infrastructure and fits into the monthly operating budget, no large upfront outlay is required.
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – Virtual File Store enables predictable, manageable costs without ongoing system investments or maintenance headaches.
• Scalability to Adjust to Business Needs – Additional capacity is immediately available with the service for short term storage spikes, long-term structural changes, such as acquisitions, and rapidly expanding digital file archives.

"As our business’ data is constantly growing, we are faced with the challenge of ensuring data availability and disaster preparedness against the associated cost," said Elliott L. Townsend, IT manager of BRUNS-PAK. "Iron Mountain Digital’s Virtual File Store service allows the relocation of static data from the production environment to a secure and reliable location of high availability at an extremely competitive cost. Also, in our case, when coupled with Iron Mountain Digital’s LiveVault solution for server data backup and protection, we achieve an extremely robust and cost-effective disaster recovery solution."

With virtually unlimited storage capacity, Virtual File Store can be integrated with a company’s existing storage infrastructure to migrate inactive files over the VPN network to Iron Mountain’s secure, redundant data centers. Authorized users and applications can then retrieve files on-demand via a secure Internet connection from anywhere at anytime within the corporate environment.

Iron Mountain Digital’s Storage-as-a-Service Model
The newest addition to Iron Mountain Digital’s Storage-as-a-Service portfolio, the Virtual File Store service leverages the security, compliance and scalability of the Storage-as-a-Service framework to manage large volumes of inactive digital data to reduce overall storage expenses. With Iron Mountain Digital’s service model, companies can deploy cost-effective cloud-based storage with enterprise-grade security to reduce the risk, cost and complexity of managing digital information.