Document storage companies provide near-instant retrieval
The information is in there somewhere. It's just a few sheets of paper,
wedged in a manila folder, one of millions stored in acres of tall steel shelves.
It's a mortgage record, generated by a Boston-area bank and filed away inside a half-million-square-foot warehouse in Northborough, Mass. Iron Mountain Inc., the nation's leading document storage company, has more than 6 million cartons in this one building, each of them stuffed with paper documents.
Now and then, a customer needs some of that paperwork. For most of Iron Mountain's 51-year history, that would mean digging out the correct carton and trucking it back to its owner. But these days, a worker is just as likely to find the correct document and run it through a digital scanner, producing a perfect electronic copy. With the press of a button, the copy is transmitted and the paper returned to its secure resting place.
Iron Mountain's going digital. Not only is the company using computer technology to convert paper records to electronic images, but it's also started a business unit focused on the long-term preservation of digital documents.
"Our clients had been asking for additional services," said Peter Delle Donne, president of Iron Mountain's digital archives unit. "They were asking us for better ways to search their electronic documents and not just their hard copy documents. They were asking us for ways to archive electronic mail."
Iron Mountain responded by building data centers and electronic networks. Now it offers secure storage sites that allow customers instant access to their electronic files without the expense of storing the data themselves. It's Iron Mountain's solution to a persistent problem of the digital age -- keeping data safe and easily accessible at the same time.
Meanwhile, in West Bridgewater, Mass., Rick Carey is working on a different data management problem: getting rid of the stuff.
The table in his office is littered with bits of information. Not digital bits; these are very real. They're scraps of aluminum, copper, steel, and plastic -- a bearing here, a spindle there, a few scraps of circuit board.
The stuff used to be a batch of hard drives; now it's scrap. Carey's company, Datasafe Information Security, began life as a shredder of paper documents. The company's three trucks cruise the Boston area, their portable shredders devouring millions of pages of unwanted documents. But in 2001, Carey went into a new sideline: the total destruction of computer hard drives and the confidential data they contain.
Carey erases computers the hard way, grinding their drives into metal fragments and -- if he's lucky -- selling the scrap. It's not worth much, he said. "In some cases, we have to pay to take it away." No matter. Customers pay an $85 pickup fee, plus $12 for each hard drive they want destroyed. They're paying for the certainty that their confidential information will never see the light of day again.
Between them, giant Iron Mountain and tiny Datasafe are helping companies solve two of the chief problems of the digital age -- saving the stuff until it's no longer needed, and utterly destroying the data when its usefulness has passed.
Iron Mountain's digital business got off to a slow start when it began last year, but Delle Donne says it's picking up.
"It took us 50 years to build a $900 million business in the paper records, " he said. But he expects off-site digital archiving to be a $200 million business for Iron Mountain in four years.
It's not just a matter of filing computer tapes in an underground vault. Many customers want instant access to their data. Iron Mountain runs data centers in Boston; in Pennsylvania, in an old mine 280 feet below ground; and in a site whose exact location is kept secret for security reasons. All information is copied three times, with one of the copies stored at a different location from the other two.
Vital data is stored on banks of hard drives, where it's available at the touch of a button. Customers who can afford to wait a few minutes have their information stored on reels of tape housed in "silos." In a few minutes, a robot can locate a tape in the silo and load it up for playback.
With high-speed digital connections to its corporate customers, Iron Mountain can provide them with seamless access to their files. Aramark Uniform Services of Burbank uses the system to keep track of uniform orders from thousands of customers in real time.
"We receive in our 180 locations about 5,000 phone calls a day," said chief financial officer David Solomon. "For our market centers to be able to get the data on demand is a tremendous time savings."
Doug Chandler, a researcher with International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass., said digital archiving makes sense for many information-dependent companies. "It's not only safe and kept for eternity, but you can get individual files back quickly if you need them," he said. But he noted that few companies have shown an interest in using the technique.
The terrorist attacks of last year spawned a lot of talk about secure data storage, Chandler said, but very little action.
"We thought here that 9/11 would drive a lot of significant business for these kinds of companies," he said. "I haven't seen it. Why it is I'm not sure. "
Delle Donne is a good deal less pessimistic. He says that customer inquiries are up fourfold since Sept. 11, and that eventually this will translate into healthy revenues.
Part of Iron Mountain's service includes expert advice on how long data should be stored, and when it can safely be destroyed. Many businesses, such as brokerage firms, are subject to strict record-keeping laws. Iron Mountain uses custom-made software to keep track of which files are cleared for deletion.
But deleting computer information is no easy task. Computer software often stores data files in many places on a disk, which means even information that's been "erased" is still there. That's not much of a problem for data stored on Iron Mountain's equipment. The company shreds expired data tapes, and writes data over the old stuff on its hard drives.
But an Iron Mountain customer still has copies of sensitive data on dozens or hundreds of individual computers scattered around the office. Most businesses replace these machines every three or four years. In Massachusetts, that means shipping them to a recycler who removes toxic metals such as lead from circuit boards and computer monitors. These recyclers could also resell the old hard drives inside the computers -- drives loaded with sensitive company secrets.
There are programs that completely wipe data from a drive, but they take hours per computer. The quick and dirty solution is to remove the hard drives from the old machines and grind them to bits. That's exactly what Carey's company Datasafe does, in a huge machine that doubles as a paper shredder.
"It'll destroy anything that isn't harder than its teeth," Carey said.
Carey got his start working corporate security for Fidelity Investments, where he learned the importance of destroying customers' sensitive documents. He started his paper-shredding business in 1990, and only branched out into hard drive destruction about 18 months ago.
The business is off to a slow start, says Carey, "because a lot of people are still unaware." But he notes that some businesses, like doctors' offices, are required by federal law to closely guard the privacy of their customers. Carey hopes that as privacy becomes a bigger issue for consumers and politicians, a growing number of businesses will choose his radical approach to data destruction.
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