Nuclear shelter turns to email
Published: 01 Jun 2004 12:00 BST
There are some companies that offer both online as well as on-site email archiving. We have an on-site partnership with Legato Software. You could fix a certain amount of email that you might want to keep on-site over a certain time period, and if you so chose, then you could take the very old stuff and put it off to us. You may want to keep most of this email for seven to 10 years, but your access to it is going to be random, and for most of it, never at all -- hopefully.
We will drive your cost of storage down through the long haul. We are going to eventually put it to tape, and take that tape and put it into one of our vaults. We will do all that physical work for you. So what we are trying to do is marry our technology knowledge that we have learned with our historical skills, as good managers of physical information and physical items. If you are going to keep something long-term, this is the right way to do it, unless you just want to pay a lot of money for it.
Doesn't IBM have a similar kind of service?
I think that if IBM is going to do off-site storage, it will use Zantaz today. But I am sure that through its Content Manager and some of its other applications, they would do it for you on-site.
If you look out in the market space for document management, for records management, for content management, what you really see is a lot of silo applications. We are a firm believer that the world is going to be open architecture -- that no company is going to buy one application across its whole geography worldwide to do everything. So all these applications are going to have to work together. Our vision, eventually, is opening up our systems so that if a customer wants to search ours and somebody else's at the same time, they can do that.
But across all of that, no matter whose technology you use, you have to install it with consistent retention rules, or you will be dead in court. The hard part is keeping consistency across applications and across what I call data pools. At Iron Mountain, we have a consulting business that will help you do that, and so we do not care if you use our technology or somebody else's -- we will help you design the policies to meet your legal requirements.
So the important thing is to make sure that the company's policies are in order, and you can help them do that?
Not only to make sure that they are in order but also to make sure that they are consistently applied and implemented. The standard in the world now -- and where the lawyers come at you -- is: did you apply that same policy to all the information, regardless of the location or format, in a consistent manner? That is hard to do.
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