For the sixth consecutive year, Fortune magazine named Iron Mountain to its list of the World’s Most Admired Companies, the definitive report card on corporate reputation. Iron Mountain ranked second in its industry category of Diversified Outsourcing Services. The industry rankings reflect feedback from executives, directors and analysts who rated Iron Mountain among its industry peers on nine key attributes of reputation, from investment value to quality of management.

Iron Mountain's Digital division on Jan. 11 announced that its Connected backup for PC has been re-engineered to support Microsoft Windows 7 systems. The upgrade, Version 8.4, also includes support for litigation e-discovery.

The cheap workhorse of PACS archiving media is undoubtedly the tape-based imaging archival system. While tape archives are seen as being reliable and inexpensive, the down side is that it is slow compared to more modern digital storage techniques.  

If Iron Mountain Digital is going to successfully spread its wings, Ramana Venkata will have to take a unit of a 59-year-old company and treat it like a startup.  

Iron Mountain's track record of document and data security is hard to beat. The company has been building its storage safety reputation since 1951, and has been known for two generations for carting away physical and digital records on tapes and storing them in underground vaults. 

Richard Reese, 63, was CEO of information management firm Iron Mountain for more than 27 years, growing the company from $3 million in annual revenue to $3 billion before retiring in 2008, although he remains chairman. When he first became CEO, he got some advice from Tom Smith, who was managing partner of private investment firm Prescott Investors then and remains so now at age 80.

Iron Mountain has specialized in storing and protecting information for organizations since it first opened for business in 1951. 

Computerworld - Down a road that winds through the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, just across from a cow pasture, the bucolic scenery of Butler County is interrupted by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.  

Cloud computing is a much-hyped yet often misunderstood tech trend.  

It's often been said that the coolest place to work in a company is in the data center--literally

APPLE dropped the word “computer” from its name in January 2007, soon after it introduced the iPhone. Likewise, Fuji Photo Film shortened its name to Fujifilm in 2006, when sales of its photography products slipped to less than one-third of total revenue. 

The storage world is changing rapidly, with innovative services playing a major role. Savvy CIOs are turning to cloud-based offerings such as enterprise storage-as-a-service to reduce costs, optimize compliance and ensure security. As Knowledge Center contributor John Clancy explains, trust, security and a history of information protection are critical factors to consider when choosing a provider to help you implement your cloud storage strategy.

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Iron Mountain helps companies store, protect and manage their data. Forbes sat down recently with Ramana Venkata, chief operating officer of Iron Mountain's digital division, to discuss the evolving roles of the CIO and general counsel and the conflicts that arise when it comes to e-discovery.

Human Resource (HR) departments, much like other functional areas within an organization, face increasing pressure to accomplish more with less. This includes becoming more efficient when handling HR records and employee transactions, both of which continue to grow at unprecedented rates and contain private information requiring secure storage and careful handling.  

Putting servers 220 feet below the Earth's surface can lead to all sorts of interesting insights.  

Video interview with Ramana Venkata, Iron Mountain Digital’s COO. 

Iron Mountain, a longtime provider of physical- and digital-records management, on Wednesday announced a cloud storage API that enables developers to take advantage of Iron Mountain's off-site storage facilities. 

While the massive proliferation of data brought on by EMRs, PACs and other digital imaging systems is causing providers to reconsider their storage capacities, the upside of the situation is that there are a number of vendors out there offering solutions. 

Stratify, a subsidiary of Iron Mountain, introduced eVantage, an on-premises, early case assessment tool for e-discovery.

On this edition of "Gateway to Government Sales" Host Scott Orbach is joined by Jeffrey Johnson, Senior VP and General Manager of Government Services for information protection and storage leader Iron Mountain. Johnson is on hand to discuss why keeping records management and data protection services both effective and affordable is a challenge, as well as the benefits that these services provide for organizations in both the public and private sector.

Iron Mountain Digital has been growing steadily since it was created as a division of records storage giant Iron Mountain Inc. in 2004. That year the company made $40 million, and last year that number climbed to $250 million, said John Clancy, Iron Mountain Digital’s president.

Business files have a defined life, marked by a distinct beginning and end. For example, a sales order, a common active file, may begin with the customer’s order and then remain “active” until the customer pays—at which point, the record becomes inactive.

Health care is indisputably one of the most data-intensive industries in the U.S., yet modern dissemination and control of patient data consistently lags behind other industries such as banking, airlines, insurance and retail.  

U.S. businesses use about 21 million tons of paper every year. That's about 175 pounds of paper for each American. Some of it ends up in landfills, others in filing cabinets, and now, thanks to the digital age, many companies are digitizing the information for easier storage, protection, and record keeping.  

Cloud storage may be creating a stir these days, but big enterprise users aren't buying in -- at least not yet.  

Cloud storage and security problems raised by this new model is on the mind of John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital. Clancy also discusses the unique data center Iron Mountain operates in a cave 220 feet below the Earth’s surface in Boyers, Pa 

You can't lobby for membership in Skull and Bones, the absurd, vaguely secret society at Yale. You wait until, as legend has it, someone pounds on your door on Tap Day, enters your room, and bellows: "Skull and Bones, accept or reject." And that's it. You're in.

As the Cardiac Care Group's imaging data began to grow larger, the solo physician practice in Cape Coral, Fla, determined that it was working with the right vendor, but the wrong archiving solution. 

The new package, called the Total Email Management Suite, offers what Iron Mountain claims is a cost-effective, total end-to-end cloud-based alternative to control e-mail that includes archiving, continuity, security and data leak prevention.  

BANGALORE (Reuters) - In mid-2000, as the dotcom boom was peaking, executives of information protection firm Iron Mountain Inc noticed an interesting trend while doing PC back-up and e-mail archiving for their clients. 

As it transitions to a digital business, Iron Mountain is reinventing technology and creating a culture of change.

Some of the country's most iconic treasures are kept underground in the protected vaults of Pennsylvania's Iron Mountain. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

Iron Mountain Digital has launched a global channel program and is looking to recruit some best-of-breed partners to sell its software- and storage-as-a service solutions for backup and archiving. Through the program, the Southborough, Mass.-based company is offering benefits such as dedicated channel management resources, whereby partners are assigned field-based channel managers and receive help with pre-sales and technical resources for Iron Mountain's solutions.

In a video interview posted on The Washington Post and in partnership with The Big Think, Executive Chairman Richard Reese discusses management challenges and leadership strategies. Among other topics, he highlights the importance of retaining talent, creating a solid company culture and putting the customer first.

This trend story on companies' growing reliance on Storage-as-a-Service spotlights Geokinetics Inc., a Houston-based geophysical services company, that backs up its computer servers using Iron Mountain's LiveVault. John Lewis, director of IS for Geokinetics, was looking into products for data management last year when someone suggested SaaS.
"For us, it was a compliance crunch," says Lewis. Fifteen months after a company merger, "I had to get all these diverse locations unified under a single strategy--with no capital investment--and I had to do it pretty rapidly," he says. Today, Geokinetics ships approximately 750GB of data, from applications such as SharePoint and accounting, daily to Iron Mountain. "You have to think outside the box to understand the advantages of the platform," says Lewis.

Many big companies shred sensitive documents to protect security. A survey says most aren't familiar with federal and state laws governing such practices. The study by document security specialist Iron Mountain says this leaves them open to fines and identity theft.

Fewer than 1 in 3 were aware of the Federal Trade Commission's Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act disposal rule. The rule says companies should properly dispose of papers that contain consumer information through methods like burning, pulverizing or shredding. The government says this ensures the information can't be read or reconstructed.

John Clancy is the president of Iron Mountain Digital, the arm of Iron Mountain that oversees storage services including remote archiving accessed by customers over the Web. In this Q&A with Network World, Clancy discusses the company's Storage-as-a-Service offering, the future of data archiving and the challenges associated with e-Discovery.

In a highly secure, naturally cooled former limestone mine located 220 feet underground, virtualization fuels Marriott's new disaster recovery strategy. With help from Iron Mountain, the hotel giant is cutting energy costs and recovery time while adding flexibility.

Iron Mountain, established in 1951 to protect paper and film records, and 11-year-old Webroot are better known for other things: Iron Mountain for carting away physical and digital records and storing them in underground vaults, and Webroot for cleaning up extraneous files in Windows computers with Window Washer and Spy Sweeper. However, both highly successful companies have come to the fore with online storage and data protection services that have the advantage of a familiar brand.

A technological partnership between Iron Mountain Digital and N-able Technologies will provide managed services using software as a service (SaaS) technology for remote data backup, storage and recovery for SMBs. The alliance highlights the growing trend of SMBs to outsource as a way to save money.

Iron Mountain Inc., the Boston data protection and storage services company that has been pushing into new digital and overseas markets, will get its first new top executive in a quarter century. The company yesterday said Bob Brennan, 47, president and chief operating officer, will take the reins as chief executive at the annual meeting June 5. He'll succeed Richard Reese, 61, who grew the company from $3 million in annual sales when he joined in 1981 to projected sales of $3 billion in 2008. Reese will stay on as executive chairman, focusing on new products and training.

Iron Mountain Inc. has opened a new Digital Record Center® for Medical Images with support from medical archiving storage hardware partner Hewlett-Packard Co. The new service launches a few days after Google Inc. revealed its move into this market.
Iron Mountain and HP's sales forces will push new disaster recovery and long-term archiving services for medical images, which will be hosted at Iron Mountain's data centers in Pennsylvania and Missouri. The services will use HP's Medical Archive Solution (MAS) to store medical images from customers. HP and Iron Mountain executives said customers will include mostly midmarket imaging centers and hospitals that can't afford on-site archives or off-site disaster recovery.

Contract managers with experience in licensing intellectual property such as software may think they know all the “ins and outs” of the licensing process. They know that placing a copy of the intellectual property into a technology escrow account held by a neutral third party is a best practice for protecting the licensee. However, what many contract managers overlook is verifying that the intellectual property can actually be of use if its developer ceases to do business or fails to provide support.

Iron Mountain Digital is formalizing a global partner program designed to extend the storage provider's reach to channel companies outside North America. The Southborough, Mass.-based technology arm of Iron Mountain Inc. offers backup and archiving capabilities via software or in Software as a Service delivery models. The company's partners can host Iron Mountain Digital's software themselves on behalf of customers, leverage an Iron Mountain hosting facility or sell software to customers for on-site installation.

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), the global leader in information protection and storage services, has announced its acquisition of Xepa Digital, LLP, a leader in the conversion of analog and outmoded digital audio and video tapes to high resolution digital file formats for archiving and distribution. By acquiring Xepa Digital, Iron Mountain further extends its footprint in the film and sound industry.

To understand both the risks and the security used all along the chain of custody, we visited with Joe DeSalvo, the head of security for information handling company Iron Mountain.

As part of a push to expand its digital storage business, Iron Mountain Inc. is unveiling a Digital Record Center® for Images (DRCI) service that allows paper records storage customers to retrieve archived documents digitally. This service is aimed at companies storing sensitive documents, such as medical charts, mortgage agreements, human resources records and sales contracts.

Iron Mountain released its Digital Record Center® for Images. The solution is designed to provide businesses hosted storage and easy access to scanned images, PDFs and other digital files. The Digital Record Center® for Images now supplies a repository for accessing those scanned images as well as other digital files, giving customers a more complete solution for managing the lifecycle of their information.

International information protection and storage company Iron Mountain has leased a 130,000-square-foot space to serve as a Miami-Dade transportation hub, records center, imaging center and to house data entry operations. The company, which offers records management, data protection, information destruction services and expertise about storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery, entered the South Florida market in 1994 and has more than 6,000 clients in the tri-county area, 20 records centers and one media vault.

This article examines the confluence of crisis management, business continuity efforts, and compliance, and how the same mindset can be used to approach all three. Fundamentally, it comes down to: knowing your risks, setting up an effective protection plan, and instituting best practices on a daily basis.
In the most basic terms, these three steps will ensure you are prepared – whether it is for a natural disaster or an audit.

If you have a business, you have business documents, and those documents face many potential threats -- fire, theft, natural disasters and computer viruses among them."Businesses that require comprehensive, multilayered network protection, backup and recovery need information management," said Mike Smith, vice president, Great Plains Territory, for Boston-based Iron Mountain, which offers information protection and storage. "From a continuity standpoint, a business can't function if data is lost."

Iron Mountain Digital, the technology business unit of the Iron Mountain records management services company, has recruited some 300 VARs, managed services providers and other partners to its channel program for its storage- and software-as-a-service backup and archiving solutions. The Southborough, Mass., company said this week that it's counting on its expanded partner roster to expand into new vertical industries and regions outside North America.

What if you wanted a secure place to store your company's electronic and paper records off-site, where they would be protected from security breaches, computer viruses or from destruction in a natural catastrophe or terrorist attack? Or what if you needed a place to safely destroy documents that have outlived their usefulness. Where could you turn for that level of service? One answer might be Iron Mountain, a Boston-based global leader in data protection and recovery, secure shredding and disaster-recovery planning.

Iron Mountain announced today that it has begun providing long-awaited data escrow services to ICANN and its panoply of approved registrars. Ever since the RegisterFly debacle exposed ICANN’s failure to account properly for the data escrow requirements of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), data escrow has been at or near the top of the ICANN agenda.

ICANN-approved registrars provide domain registration and hosting services, and contact with a registrar is generally as close as your average domain holder gets to the nuts and bolts of the internet.

Second acquisition in a month 'locks down' company's film and sound archive services portfolio.
Data protection and storage provider Iron Mountain Nov. 19 announced that it is acquiring privately held Xepa Digital, a specialist in converting analog and outmoded digital audio and video tapes to high resolution digital file formats for archiving and distribution. Iron Mountain did not disclose the acquisition price.

There's no lack of tools available for mounting this defense. When we said we were doing a story on data security, more than 100 companies offered products. That makes sense, however, since just about everything in security ultimately is about data security. Certainly that's the case with traditional security measures like access control, encryption, and network monitoring. But it's the most recent crop of products focused on the threat of data leakage that we're zeroing in on. (See chart below for a full list of products considered.)

Iron Mountain, DataDefense, Endpoint encryption, antitheft

New federal rules will take effect next month requiring corporations to produce documents in legal cases or face stiff penalties, raising yet another regulatory compliance issue for IT departments.
On December 1, several amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure regarding a company's duty to preserve and produce electronically stored information (ESI) in the face of litigation or pending litigation

The secret to leadership may not boil down to that vision thing. It may not be some exceptional ability to inspire others, nor the courage to zig when all signs point to zag.

Iron Mountain (IRM) President and COO Bob Brennan, a psychology major in college, says his judgment was also clouded by opportunity. He was CEO of Connected, a data backup company, and he remembers the heady days of preparing for an initial public offering. "Suffice it to say, I didn't scrutinize the market well enough," he says. Rather, he listened to market hype and substantially overestimated the value of the company. Finding little interest among potential investors, the IPO filing was withdrawn. Connected later was acquired by Iron Mountain in 2004.

Brennan said it taught him not to let excitement and mood interfere with judgment. He was able to earn group trust and rebuild his team by taking responsibility for the failure. He also learned that failure can reveal true partners and distinguish them from "those who just wanted to be attached to success."

In what may be the first of many such moves, Iron Mountain on Wednesday acquired Stratify, a leading vendor of e-discovery software, for $158 million in cash.

The purchase could inaugurate a number of technology-related acquisitions for the iconic records management and storage company over the next five years: Iron Mountain is attempting to replicate its dominance in the physical document management industry with the fast-growing digital records sector.

New report finds that despite the growing importance of records management to prevent snafus in corporate litigation, only one-third of companies believe they have a comprehensive records management program.

The 2007 Iron Mountain Compliance Benchmark Report surveyed nearly 2,000 people at public, private, government, and nonprofit organizations. Only 35 percent of respondents said they have a formal, enterprise-wide records management policy—despite new “e-discovery” rules for civil litigation that are proving ever more painful for companies whose sloppy recordkeeping returns to haunt them in court.

One of the biggest problems facing companies when they discover a data leakage incident al la TJX Companies is that they finally realize that they don't have a firm handle on just where all their information resides.

It's a story that's repeated time-and-time again by post-breach forensics experts -- whose first job upon being hired after an incident is typically to try and backtrack to figure out just what types and volumes of data have been exposed, and how.

According to a new study from data archiving and storage back-up specialists Iron Mountain, one of the primary reasons that companies often find themselves in this unenviable position is because they lack an enterprise-wide records management strategy in the first place.

Iron Mountain Inc. continued its 2007 buying spree today when it purchased competitor RMS Services – USA Inc., which provides records management services for healthcare systems.
Iron Mountain did not disclose the price when it revealed the acquisition at its analyst day in New York but said RMS is a $27 million company. The 30-year-old Southfield, Mich.-based RMS helps convert physical records into electronic images.

Seizing on a services opportunity by expanding its presence in the health care sector, Iron Mountain on Tuesday announced the acquisition of RMS Services.

RMS is a records and file-room management services company that focuses on the health care industry. As more U.S. health-care providers trade in paper-based medical records for electronic systems, they need help converting and storing that information. Records management company Iron Mountain said it hopes to satisfy those requests with this acquisition.

Mike Nikitas of NECN interviews Bob Brennan, President & COO Iron Mountain
"From Hollywood original films to medical records to details of transactions that must be kept on file. It's a growing business, especially as businesses try to comply with more strict regulations".

Iron Mountain Inc., once known primarily for its tape shipping business, has been busy in recent months reinventing itself as an online backup and records management company. The latest in its string of acquisitions and partnerships is a records management services provider based in Irvine, Calif., called Accutrac Software Inc., for an undisclosed sum.

For U.S. companies, information privacy compliance is fast becoming a significant business priority, and not just because data is more decentralized, distributed, and mobile than ever before. The meteoric rise of identity theft, coupled with highly-publicized security breach incidents, has spawned public outrage and customer demand for swift and corrective actions. Lawmakers at both the state and federal level are responding with a growing number of laws that govern the collection, use, and disposal of confidential records. As a result, companies find themselves trying to reassure legislators and customers alike that this information, whether in paper or electronic record form, is protected for safety-and destroyed, if necessary, before it can be compromised.

Brian P. McKeon, EVP and CFO, Iron Mountain Inc. A relative newcomer to Iron Mountain, McKeon is expected to work the same kind of magic as he did at his previous assignments for Timberland Co. and PepsiCo Inc. At Timberland, he was an expansion expert, implementing a global treasury and adding new brands, including SmartWool; at PepsiCo, he played a key role in the splitoff of its bottling and concentrate businesses in North America.

 Mary Nam of KOMO 4 TV, Seattle’s ABC affiliate, profiles Iron Mountain’s underground facility in Pennsylvania

John Clancy, of Iron Mountain, talks about the importance and ease of use for online software that allows companies to easily and automatically back up data.

The freakout point is that fear threshold you must push yourself past. CEOs say crossing it provides lessons useful in business and life. There's the significance of knowing that what frightens can be survived, as well as the importance of concentrating when concentration is all but impossible. Perhaps the most common freakout point comes with public speaking, and Iron Mountain CEO Richard Reese remembers being drafted early in his career to do a last-minute presentation on a technical subject he knew zero about.

Iron Mountain's Tom Mackowski, talks to Christine Perry about distributed data. Enterprises funnel loads of time, money, and energy into the process of protecting in-house data, and for good reason--the existing threats to data are numerous. Yet the moment an enterprise situates employees outside those walls, the rules of protection change. The reality according to Mackowski is that "about 60% of all corporate data is in remote offices and out of the IT department's control."

- Computer storage is a topic replete with impenetrable acronyms and unimaginably large numbers, such as exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, the last representing a one followed by 24 zeros. Richard Reece, chairman and chief executive of Boston-based data management giant Iron Mountain, says the old idea of bulk storage has become redundant because of the speed and precision with which individual items may have to be retrieved.

Podcast interview with Kevin B. Roden, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Iron Mountain Tune in to a candid conversation with Kevin, who talks about all things data: compliance, security procedures, encryption, and more.

By Christine Dunn - In the latest of our occasional Q&As with governance and compliance executives, we talk to Garry Watzke, general counsel at $2 billion Iron Mountain.

Q & A with Richard Reese - With the explosion of digital data enabling massive collections of records, governments have gotten into the business of specifically defining how information is stored, managed and destroyed.
 Chief Executive Richard Reese recently spoke with Investor's Business Daily about how companies are dealing with the information explosion and the requirements of record management.

Iron Mountain was selected to the 'Forbes 400 Best Big Companies List.' Of the 1000 winning companies with over $1 Billion in revenues, Iron Mountain was ranked 6th in the Business Services & Supplies category.

Compliance within a healthcare organization is not about creating a new department responsible for ensuring the organization satisfies a particular set of regulatory requirements. It's a critical risk management philosophy that protects, or even enhances, the value of your brand in the eyes of your stakeholders (investors, employees and patients). It's about creating an environment where employees want to do the right thing and where employees want to work. Compliance isn't a problem to be solved; it's a way of doing business that needs to be integrated into the day-to-day operations of the business.

As governance needs, litigation pressures, and legislative mandates continue to increase the demand for records management, so does the imperative for companies to develop and maintain an effective records-management program. This article recommends 10 resolutions-five immediate steps for entities new to the area, and five that are key to ongoing success-that can reduce the risks, costs, and complexity of an organization's records-management program.

 Iron Mountain was named to Forbes magazine's list of The 400 Best Big Companies, selected based on metrics of revenues, stock market returns, sales and earnings-per-share growth and debt-to-capital ratios.

Iron Mountain is looking to grow its leading market share in the PC backup market with a major architectural update of its Connected Backup/PC product. It is building on the product's strong data reduction capability and ease-of-use strengths.

Ken Rubin, senior vice president of corporate strategy at Iron Mountain explains to Jack how the new Rules of Civil Procedure and Rule 26 changes affect eDiscovery.

When C. Richard Reese took over Iron Mountain Inc. in December 1981, the firm had 70 employees and $3 million in sales, mostly from storing documents in a couple underground vaults in the Catskills. Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) now has 17,000 employees and $2.3 billion in annual sales, storing documents and data on five continents

Two hundred feet beneath the hills of western Pennsylvania lies a closely guarded labyrinth, with more than 20 miles of tunnels and hundreds of unmarked rooms, where some of the most important records in the world are kept.

What does "Einstein Sticking His Tongue Out," the famous photograph, have in common with flags and other memorabilia left at the crash site of Flight 93, which went down on Sept. 11, 2001? Both are locked in a Pennsylvania storage facility 220 feet below the ground, which is owned by Boston-based Iron Mountain.

StreetWatch Video
Interviewer: Gregg Greenberg

How can a start-up company secure financing using its technology as collateral? It is possible, but banks are typically reluctant to accept this asset as a surety.

Boston-based Iron Mountain Inc. consolidated its technology unit this week, combining three locations into a new Southborough facility to house the half-century-old company's burgeoning electronic-storage business...

A closer look at the Software as a Service model and how technology escrow can help protect your subscription investment and, potentially, your business...

Who are the best CEOs in the computer business?

Every month seems to bring another episode of sensitive personal information escaping into the wild because a corporate or government laptop computer is lost or stolen. A common response is a lot of hand-wringing over how the data should have been encrypted.

Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Inc., has combined its backup software product, Connected Backup/PC, and its data-protection solution, DataDefense, into a new marketing strategy called the PC Data Protection Suite. For PCs and laptops, Connected Backup/PC backs up and restores data, and Data Defense encrypts data and also remotely eliminates data if a laptop is lost or stolen to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the information it contains.

Not all data compromises arise from malicious hacking incidents or from the loss of computers and storage media containing sensitive information. Data thefts often occur when companies fail to properly destroy paper documents and other media containing important information.

 Iron Mountain has one of the 10 most recognizable brands on the planet (as does IBM). The company is the trusted source for what most of the world considers disaster recovery to be -- keeping documents safe and available in some warehouse somewhere so that if I need it, they can get it.

 Iron Mountain manages other people’s risks, but its treasurer is getting a handle on its own.

In Fortune Magazine's "America's Most Admired Companies 2006," Iron Mountain ranks 3rd for Diversified Outsourcing.

When it comes to preserving your digital heritage, backup is only the beginning.

What's the best strategy for making sure what's here today won't be gone tomorrow?

 Iron Mountain on Monday announced its new DataDefense service, which enables customers to control data elimination or lock down all files on stolen PCs and laptops via an online interface.

Iron Mountain's recently announced acquisition of LiveVault put the spotlight on what analysts say is a growing market for managed backup and recovery services.

Here are two ways to protect yourself from data disaster, each with distinct advantages, if your hard drive dies.

Off-site data archiving vendor Iron Mountain Inc. last week signed a deal to use Decru Inc.'s technology to encrypt all of its internal data that's backed up to digital tape. Iron Mountain executives said the move was made in part to set an example for customers, though IT managers at the Storage Decisions conference in New York last week downplayed the need for such tools.

Iron Mountain is putting its money where its mouth is and encrypting its data tapes with Decru's DataFort storage security appliance

There comes a time in a growing small business' life when it must choose: develop the resources to handle mushrooming IT demands in-house, or outsource them. RL Corp., a holding parent company for two accounting services firms in Westchester, Pa., chose to off-load both its backup and disaster recovery (DR) operations on Iron Mountain Corp.