Remote managed services

Outsource the operation and management of your licensed Iron Mountain solutions

The volatile economic climate over the past few years has placed a heavy burden on IT organizations to cope with ever-growing infrastructures and data volumes, with little or no increase in personnel. Supporting a large data backup or archiving function can place considerable added strains on an already stretched IT staff. As a result, many organizations are embracing solutions that allow them to offload the burden of administering these functions within their environment, and instead focus their internal IT resources on areas that support their primary business. This has increased the popularity of both cloud-based solutions, as well as the use of managed services for information deemed too valuable or sensitive to store in the cloud.

Remote managed services to the rescue

The Iron Mountain Remote Managed Services offering assigns an experienced analyst to remotely administer the licensed Iron Mountain data backup and/or archiving solutions deployed at your location. Our subject matter experts leverage their knowledge of your environment — as well as that of the Iron Mountain products you’ve purchased — both to optimize our product capabilities within your infrastructure and also to proactively monitor these solutions to quickly and effectively address any unplanned issues that may occur.

Remote Managed Services can substantially offload your IT staff resources required to implement and operate Iron Mountain products, while simultaneously ensuring optimal product availability and performance for your end users. Since our analysts are intimately familiar with the capabilities of our products, they can help you identify opportunities to implement and manage them in ways that help you maintain compliance with your information governance policies, including the optimization of information security, privacy, and retention policies.

Key remote managed services deliverables

Remote Managed Services are staffed by experienced Iron Mountain analysts who proactively participate in the implementation, administration, and management of our licensed products on your premises. The functions that our analysts perform include:

• Consulting with your appropriate teams to determine policies and rules to be reflected in the application.
• Evaluating product performance on an ongoing basis, with optimization tuning when applicable.
• Identifying and remediating application problems, bottlenecks, and issues identified in logs.
• Opening and managing change requests for problems experienced at your site(s). Issue resolution is streamlined due to our analysts’ direct connections to senior Iron Mountain support and engineering resources.
• Scheduling, planning, and implementing software upgrades within the framework of your change management process and procedures.
• Responding to inquiries from your helpdesk on technical questions or issues.
• Providing application support for your planned hardware changes.
• Performing disaster recovery of application servers if a failure occurs.
• Optional Add-On. Providing 24x7x365 real-time monitoring for your on-premises application servers.

The primary purpose of Remote Managed Services is to offload the work and time your staff would otherwise spend on the administration of your on-premises, licensed Iron Mountain solutions. The services we provide are specifically focused on managing and maintaining these Iron Mountain solutions, and do not extend into other operational aspects of your data center. You will still retain ultimate responsibility for all of the peripheral technologies that run and support your Iron Mountain solutions, including third-party hardware and software, networking and security, internal helpdesk for end-user issues and questions, and maintaining clear escalation paths for your relevant technical teams.

The best of both worlds

As a Remote Managed Services client, your data is kept securely within the “four walls” of your organization, while a dedicated Iron Mountain analyst performs administration and monitoring of your licensed Iron Mountain solution on an ongoing basis. Doing this will save you both time and money by not dedicating members of your own staff to manage your Iron Mountain solutions. Your assigned Iron Mountain analyst will perform all necessary upgrades for the systems within your data center that support your Iron Mountain solutions, as well as schedule upgrades for your end users as applicable. In this way, Remote Managed Services represents an extension of your organization’s IT team, and doesn’t impact your team’s ability to focus their attention and resources on other strategic tasks.

A clear advantage

Remote Managed Services represents an ideal approach for organizations whose governance policies and/or preferences necessitate that the storage and management of critical data remain internal rather than be outsourced to “the cloud.” To learn more about Remote Managed Services, contact your Iron Mountain sales representative or call 800-899-IRON (4766). You’ll be glad you did!