Digital technology has disrupted large swaths of the economy and is generating huge amount of data, where the average backup hovers at around a petabyte. Not all organizations can cope up with this data deluge and look to service providers for storage and protection. Many service providers provide tape-based backup and archiving services. Despite their best efforts to innovate, data volumes always seem to grow faster, pushing the boundaries of tape capacity.
Today, companies of all sizes still use tape to store business information, but now it is more for cold storage than for data that needs to be accessed frequently. While tape as a low cost and reliable storage option is ideal for data not being accessed often, maintaining multiple versions of software and legacy infrastructure can put a burden on already taxed resources. These challenges come at a cost including software licenses, maintenance, and a waste of technical resources that could be spent on other more important initiatives to help drive business innovation. As a service provider, you need a secure and compliant data storage option that will enable you to sell more value added services. 
As reported in Tech Target, a Storage magazine Purchasing Intention survey showed that the trend away from tape continues – 76% of IT professionals see their use of tape as a backup format either declining or staying the same.
Some service providers are considering offering cloud-based backup-as-a-service without causing any security concerns for their customers. Others are looking for a solution that combines the benefits of faster data access along with the cost advantages of tape.
More than a few service providers have discovered an ideal solution that covers all of these benefits: Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) object storage platform. As a highly scalable, multi-tenant, multi-protocol object storage system, ECS is the perfect platform that helps service providers to better meet their service-level-agreement (SLA) commitments to customers by offering highly resilient, reliable and low-cost storage services with enterprise-class security.
Iron Mountain® Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), a leading provider of storage and information management services, is one of those who have discovered this solution. In additional to its traditional tape-based storage-as-a-service, it partnered with Dell to provide a cost-effective, scalable and modern Cloud Archive as a part of their services portfolio. Designed to scale as the volume of data grows with ECS as the backend storage platform, the Cloud Archive solution is ideal for organizations needing offsite, pay-as-you-use archival storage with near-infinite scalability.
“Our customers trust that we know where the data is by having those cloud-based solutions in our datacenters. It gives them a peace of mind where they know where their data is at rest.” said Eileen Sweeney, SVP Data Management at Iron Mountain.
Watch the video below to hear more about how Iron Mountain uses ECS to modernize its storage management services for 95% of Fortune 1000 companies. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSaVBD-4M0g “]
You’ll find the full rundown of Iron Mountain Cloud Archive solution with ECS here.
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