Iron Mountain continues its push into software as a service with new offerings.Iron Mountain announced Aug. 21 that it has opened its first data center in Toronto, Canada and will offer online PC and server backup through it as hosted services.
The new center is the third wholly owned data center built and operated by Iron Mountain; the others are in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The company, which broke the $2 billion revenue mark in 2005, also partners with other data center companies at seven locations in Asia and Japan.
Long known as the company that trucks away enterprise data tape cassettes to safe archive locations, Iron Mountains Connected Backup for PC and LiveVault Server Backup software packages are now available directly to Canadian businesses through the new data center.
The services are designed for small- to-medium-size businesses of 50 to 5,000 employees and enterprises of 5,000 or more employees, Hartmut Wagner, Iron Mountain Digital senior vice president of sales and marketing, told eWEEK.
The PC and server backup services operate in the background, unnoticed by the user, and can restore a full system, all its applications, all data files and personal settings in the event of an outage or other disruption in service, Wagner said. All services are handled online on a subscription basis.
Click here to read more about the release of the completion of Iron Mountains e-discovery suite.
The new data center and service package, which will be "mirrored" by a similar facility in Montreal, will allow Canadian organizations to protect and store internal and customer data without it allowing to leave Canada. It also will help users comply with federal, provincial and international regulations to avoid costly fines, penalties and legal liability, Iron Mountain Canada senior vice president Pierre Matteau told eWEEK.
"New regulations, such as British Columbias Bill 73 that amended the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, mandate that governmental agencies in British Columbia in possession of personal data relating to individuals residing in British Columbia, must retain such data in Canada," Matteau said.
"With the addition of our first Canadian data centers, Canadian businesses now can partner with Iron Mountain to store and protect their data, while maintaining compliance with todays regulations."
Bill 73, enacted in response to the United States Patriot Act, requires that all personal, government and medical information belonging to Canadian citizens be housed physically in servers and storage located in Canada —and not in the United States.
"Switzerland is another country that has enacted a bill of this nature, to protect its citizens," Matteau said.
For several years, Boston-based Iron Mountain has been quietly augmenting its core physical data storage business by building its own data centers and developing online managed services through its software arm, Iron Mountain Digital. IMD, which provides data backup/recovery and archiving SAAS (software as a service), launched an e-mail management software package last March.
To read more about the trend towards online storage, click here.
Connected Backup for PC automatically backs up desktop and laptop computers at predetermined intervals as users go about their normal tasks. LiveVault server backup provides file, database, Exchange e-mail and application server data protection for small and medium businesses, as well as remote offices, Wagner said.
Pricing is determined on a gigabyte or terabyte volume scale, Wagner said, and it is customized to the user. For pricing information, see the Iron Mountain Website.
Publicly held Iron Mountain, founded in 1951, has more than 310,000 customers and 17,000 employees worldwide and sells directly and through channel partners. Iron Mountain Digital is based in Framingham, Mass. with European headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.
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