Iron Mountain Digital and ISIT

In Conversation with Mr. Abdeslam Afras, Sales Manager Middle East for Iron Mountain Digital, and Mr. Mahesh Vaidyanathan, CEO of ISIT AE FZ LLC.

Abdeslam Afras is Sales Manager Middle East of Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain, that oversees storage services including remote archiving accessed by customers over the Web. Afras came on board from Connected Corporation after it was acquired by Iron Mountain in 2004. He became Sales Manager Middle East in April 2007.

Who is Iron Mountain Digital?
Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), is the world's leading provider of software- and storage-as-a service solutions for backup and archiving. Our comprehensive Data Protection and eRecords Management solutions help thousands of corporations and tens of thousands of small and mid-sized companies:

• Mitigate risk related to electronic records and information
• Automatically and reliably back up and recover server and PC data
• Meet regulatory compliance requirements
• Respond to litigation in real time
• Contain storage costs 

What does Storage-as-a-Service mean?

Today's IT resources are consumed with day-to-day data management
With today's exponential data growth, increasingly distributed workforces and complicated regulatory requirements, IT resources are often consumed with data management – typically at the expense of applying their expertise to advance the business. CIOs are giving greater consideration to outsourcing than ever before and are looking to Storage-as-a-Service for data protection expertise to free up IT resources.

Under the Storage-as-a-Service outsourcing model, CIOs and IT professionals are prodded to think differently and more strategically about their data management:

• How do I plan to use data now and in the future?
• How do I make data accessible and useful?
• How does data management affect my workflow?
• Do I have visibility into the Chain of Custody?
• Can I access my data quickly and easily?

In today's fast-changing environment, companies cannot afford to overlook the expertise, speed-to-market and cost benefits outsourcing data management can deliver.

Why Iron Mountain Digital for Storage-as-a-Service?
Iron Mountain Digital is backed by:

• 20,000+ people focused on data protection and storage
• 57 years of experience
• 7.2+ billion digital assets under management
• more than half billion dollars invested to provide data protection, archiving and storage services

Let us do the work; you take the credit using our storage-as-a-Service and focus on your core competences and businesses.

What does a typical customer use your service for?
Imagine employees PCs with critical business data are now backed up each and every day automatically running in the background and sent to our data center. They just need an agent on their PC, and just set and forget. There's no effort and management of a backend. We take care of all the upgrades to new versions, patches, etc. on the data center.

This applies to server backup as well! Why placing a tape library at my premises that still needs to be managed when I can have an automated, most efficient server backup solution that offers Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and a unique Delta Restore capability that drastically speeds restoration for common causes of data loss and data corruption? On top of that, we offer an optional Turbo Restore Appliance for local disk-speed recoveries of current data and recent history. This enables our customers meeting the most stringent Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) in conjunction with SLAs.

To simplify the offerings for our customers, we have launched a Data Protection Suite for the Middle East that releases all the pains a client can have with regard to distributed data. The third pillar of the suite focuses on security. Iron Mountain's DataDefense offers the first automated endpoint security solution that combines intelligent encryption with enterprise-controlled data destruction:

CONNECTED® BACKUP/PC MAKES CERTAIN YOU’LL ALWAYS HAVE YOUR DATA; DATADEFENSE ENSURES NO ONE ELSE EVER WILL!

Where do you store customer data?
We have two data centers in the U.S. One is in Boyers, Pa. Literally 220 feet below the Earth's surface. The other is in Kansas City. The European data centers are in the UK and in Belgium. Our customers have the choice of using either the US or the European data centers. Our data centers are mirrored and highly available. Of course, when you talk about backup, security, archiving, business continuity, eDiscovery, disaster recovery and compliance highly available Data Centers (Redundancies) are indispensable!

Do you have your solutions also available as licensed product?
Yes we do. With most of our technologies, we can offer them as licensed products as well as a service. We offer a very flexible model because there are still customers who insist on keeping their data in house while others prefer to have them stored off-site in a secure and safe Iron Mountain data center. Looking at the market, we realize that the number of those asking for our storage-as-a-service offerings is increasing.

Besides the Data Protection Suite, what else do you offer for companies in the Middle East?
We have an attractive portfolio, but let me focus on one service offering that perfectly complements our Data Protection Suite and that is our Total Email Management Suite. (TEMS).  With TEMS we solve multiple complex email problems with one integrated service. Organizations today spend a great deal of time and money trying to manage email challenges, which are increasingly the source of high costs and risks.

Iron Mountain's Total Email Management Suite is a comprehensive managed service for solving their most critical email management challenges and ensuring that email is always available. It provides email archiving, storage management, discovery, continuity and security in a cost-effective, single-source solution.

The Suite consists of three integrated, quick-to-deploy managed services (also sold separately):

• Active Archiving Service for Email allows businesses to manage email storage, retention, legal discovery and disaster recovery while providing end-users with easy access and relief from email quotas. Reduces the size of Microsoft Exchange message stores by up to 80%!
• Continuity Service for Email ensures that email and BlackBerry® messaging will always be up and running, no matter what happens to the physical facilities, servers, software, network connectivity or even IT staff
• Security Service for Email provides best-in-class spam and virus protection for email with the lowest total cost of ownership

As an integrated managed service, the Total Email Management Suite saves time and cost of deploying expensive onsite hardware and software that would require dedicated staff to maintain, monitor and upgrade. Plus, it allows to consolidate a company's email management tasks on a single solution from a trusted provider with market-leading expertise in data protection, records retention and eDiscovery. The Suite helps ensure that companies will:

• always have access to email & BlackBerry services
• never lose messages
• be able to quickly respond to legal eDiscovery requests and internal investigations
• be able to improve the performance and reliability of their production email environment
• have secure mails protected from spam and viruses
• be able to quickly restore lost mail after an outage
• be able control email retention and quickly retrieve messages for legal and compliance requests

Being 4 years with Iron Mountain and 3.5 years with Connected Corporation, how did the market change in your opinion?
The biggest change we have observed in the last years is the growing acceptance of storage-as-a-service or software-as-a-service-model. Companies are looking for solutions to solve many of their problems and make the decision between what's core to their business and what's contextual. There are no businesses that run their business on backup and archiving. Backup and archiving is necessary to protect their business.

Who do you cooperate with in the Middle East?
In the Middle East, our cooperation partners are the storage experts ISIT, STME and Fujitsu Siemens Computers. We also work with the leading Telecom Service Provider in Kuwait, FASTtelco.

How important is the Middle East region for Iron Mountain?
The Middle East with its innovative and fast growing economies turned into a world business hub. Companies emerging in this region suffer from the same pain as everywhere: data have to be protected, made available and made useful in a cost and time-efficient way. The priorities of senior IT executives have been shifting towards business outcome concentrating their efforts on the company's bottom line. The solutions of Iron Mountain help senior IT executives manage the data the way they need to manage it.

Mahesh, CEO ISIT

Who is ISIT?
Established in 1991 in the Netherlands, ISIT is one of the pioneering storage systems integrators in Europe. After its tremendous success in Europe and as a part of a global expansion strategy, ISIT opened its office in Dubai Internet City in January of 2008. ISIT helps companies in the Middle East Store, Structure and Secure their strategic digital assets by designing, implementing and supporting enterprise class solutions. ISIT is a voting member of the Storage Networking Industry Association Europe (SNIA).

What is unique about ISIT?
Using consultative methodology ISIT offers a comprehensive suite of storage solutions by integrating state of the art technologies from Network Appliance, Symantec, Brocade, Iron Mountain, Data Domain, Texas Memory, Tandberg Data, Solix, VMWare and Riverbed.

ISIT provides best-fit solutions after careful study of the existing environment and future requirements. Our services include providing expert advice, solution design, detailed proposals, implementation and knowledge transfer training and support. Our engineers and consultants have in-depth knowledge and experience in translating storage requirements into customer specific solutions. ISIT provides 24 x 7 telephonic as well as on-site support through experienced, vendor certified engineers.

What is the potential for SaaS in the region?
Most of the companies in the region do offsite tape vaulting. This is costly affair which needs an offsite location. It is also a management and security nightmare. Storage as a Service (SaaS) totally eliminates these risks and costs.

SaaS is relatively a new phenomenon in the region. Having received excellent response from a number of businesses in the region ISIT believes that there is tremendous potential for SaaS in this region especially in the SME space. SMEs are today looking forward to have a reliable SaaS provider like ISIT to outsource their PC and server Backups, Disaster recovery etc.

Bandwidth and security are some of the concerns which ISIT helps to ally using its consultative approach. As a testament to ISIT’s unique approach, customers from even the financial services industry are using ISIT Storage as a Service, Backup solution.

What are the solutions ISIT provides?
ISIT range of solutions include Storage Consolidation, Data Classification, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), High performance Solid State disks, Storage & Server Virtualization, Capacity Optimization (Deduplication), Backup And Restore, Compliance, High Availability and Disaster Recovery, Database Recovery, WAN and Application Optimization and Storage as a Service.

What is the kind of investment that ISIT is making in the region?
ISIT has already hired some of the top-notch Storage specialists in the region. Each of them has a minimum of 8 years in depth storage experience. This also includes industry veterans with exclusive 15 years storage experience. ISIT will also be hiring a few more high calibre storage consultants before the year ending. In the next 6 months ISIT plans to expand to other countries across the Middle East and India.