Iron Mountain Completes E-Discovery Suite

Iron Mountain, best known as the company that trucks away data tape cassettes to safe archive locations, has been building its digital managed services package for a few years and now has completed it with the March 12 launch of its e-mail management software package.

The Framingham, Mass. companys Active Archiving Service for Email, supplied by partner MessageOne, is designed to manage an enterprises e-mail storage for retention and legal discovery purposes, a company spokesperson said.

The new archiving service completes what Iron Mountain calls its Total Email Management Suite, which already provides e-mail storage management, discovery, continuity and disaster recovery and security services in a single application.

E-mail is a vital business application, yet its benefits are offset by numerous costs and risks. All companies, regardless of size or industry, must contend with increasing volumes of e-mail that strain the capacity and reliability of their e-mail servers.

There are also new electronic discovery regulations that require legally defensible retention policies and quick access to e-mails in the event of litigation. All this can have a negative impact to productivity when employees and IT staff spend time managing e-mail instead of focusing on core business activities.

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About 75 percent of electronic discovery "events" involve e-mail, according to IT storage researcher Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass.

"Given the growing costs of litigation and increasing regulatory pressures to effectively manage e-mail as a record of the business, there is a great need in the market for an e-mail management solution that enables an efficient and legally defensible e-discovery policy," said Brian Babineau, a senior analyst for ESG.

"Now, with the addition of an active archiving solution and other message management capabilities including security and data protection, Iron Mountain is well-positioned to provide a full suite of services that address the common yet growing email-related issues that companies face, including compliance, security, business continuity and storage resource utilization."

Click here to read about how e-mail archiving vendors are upgrading their e-discovery capabilities.

The new Active Archiving Service for Email from MessageOne, of Austin, Texas, is available on its own or as part of the Total Email Management suite, which includes Continuity Service for Email, a managed service that can be rapidly activated following a network interruption, facilities outage or other event that disables an organizations primary e-mail system.

The package also includes Security Service for Email, a managed service that automatically eliminates spam, viruses and unwanted content from the e-mail environment.

Additional features of the Active Archiving Service for Email, as listed by the company, include:

• Storage Management: Reduces the size of e-mail data stores by as much as 80 percent while providing users with full searchable access to their e-mail.
• Fully managed service: Designed for high availability, security and ease of scaling, that can be deployed in a few hours and easily administered from a single Web console.
• Retention Management: Enables flexible management and auditing of e-mail retention policies and support for litigation holds.
• E-discovery: Makes it easy for legal counsel and other authorized users to search selected mailboxes or across an entire population and export results to legal review tools.
• Outlook integration: Allows users to work in their familiar e-mail environment. Provides full, searchable access to e-mail with the ability to restore individual messages.

Competitor calls this a Hail Mary

Steve King, CEO of e-mail archiving market share leader Zantaz, told eWEEK from his office in Pleasanton, Calif. that moving into the digital space "is not Iron Mountains core competency, by any means."

"After all, they had to go outside and get a partner [MessageOne] to do the heavy lifting regarding the software," King said. "They had struggled before and had several failed attempts in the past at trying to do this."

King went on: "They had to write off something like $5.2 million on those failed tries at building this software, according to their quarterly report. This sounds like a real Hail Mary-type thing to me," King said.

Zantaz claims to own 60 percent of the market in the on-demand e-mail archiving sector, with 14 billion e-mails under management and 11 of the Fortune 25 companies under contract.

Pricing and availability

The Active Archiving Service for Email, along with the Total Email Management Suite, is immediately available in the United States, UK, Germany and France, with plans to introduce to other countries over the coming months, the spokesperson said.

In the United States, the Total Email Management Suite pricing starts at $6 per user per month.

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