Iron Mountain Acquires Three Regional Storage Companies

The old-line storage company acquires data protection firms IG2 Data Security in Chicago, DATAPROS Storage and Staffing in Phoenix and Data Backup in Sarasota, Fla. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Iron Mountain, which has been quiet news-wise since it sold its digital storage businesses for $380 million to Autonomy 18 months ago, got back into that exact business Dec. 10 by acquiring three regional-size storage-related companies.

The venerable Boston-based company acquired data protection firms IG2 Data Security in Chicago, DATAPROS Storage and Staffing in Phoenix and Data Backup in Sarasota, Fla. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

As one of the leading independent providers in the Chicago area, IG2 Data Security has offered data protection and backup tape storage services to Chicago, northwest Indiana and southeastern Wisconsin since 2002. DATAPROS Storage and Staffing is an independent data protection provider in Phoenix, offering media storage and management services.

Generically named Data Backup was founded in 1994 and serves as a data storage and disaster recovery service provider in western Florida.

"We welcome the customers of these firms and are committed to serving their data backup and recovery needs," Iron Mountain President for North America Harry Ebbighausen said. "Acquisitions are a key component of our overall strategy to drive growth and returns on invested capital, and we will continue to seek opportunities that enhance our existing operations or expand our service footprint."

IMD 'Retired' Its Public Storage Business in April 2011

Iron Mountain Digital, a latecomer to digital storage that got into the cloud storage race in 2009, retired its commodity-type public storage services, Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform in April 2011. That left it with the archiving, e-discovery and custom backup businesses that Autonomy purchased.

Later in 2011, Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. Autonomy now is HP's unstructured data software and services arm.

IMD said in April 2011 that had been planning to phase completely out of the basic online storage business by 2013, which made it the first major player in cloud storage to pull out of the sector. That phase-out happened sooner than expected, thanks to Autonomy.

Iron Mountain entered the digital storage business in 2001 as a natural extension of its services, but said that the digital business has faced a number of challenges, leading to a strategic review and decision to sell the unit.

Iron Mountain, founded in 1951, is one of the oldest U.S. providers of information storage and management. The company's network of storage locations spans 64 million square feet across nearly 1,000 facilities in 32 countries. It makes software for records management, data backup and recovery, document management, and secure shredding help organizations to lower storage costs, comply with regulations, recover from disaster, and better use their information for business advantage.