Iron Mountain Digital Steps Out Of Cloud Storage; Nirvanix Steps In

Well, it appears again that companies that are good at one thing won't necessarily be good at trying other things. Iron Mountain Digital, the public cloud offshoot from Iron Mountain--the company that stores papers in caves and giant vaults and drives around in vans all the time--has collapsed.

Iron Mountain Digital has been in trouble for some time now, and it's been confirmed that this public cloud business will cease operation. Apparently, the cloud business was a bit of a business mess for Iron Mountain, as the company could never really figure out how to make money at it. But, in my opinion, the problem really runs much deeper than that.

Iron Mountain is not a technology company. I would agree with Iron Mountain shareholder Paul Singer, who believes Iron Mountain is more like a real estate company. Think about it: Iron Mountain wanted to try and get into cloud storage--the latest, and most advanced form of storage available today--yet it never innovated a storage system. It never innovated any storage software IP of its own that I'm aware of. This is a company that excelled in the physical realm, took a chance on making it in the digital realm and fell flat.

Customers who have their data in the Iron Mountain public cloud now need to look elsewhere, and the top options are really a group of technology innovators such as Amazon Web Services (S3) and Nirvanix. For companies that just need scratch storage or are developing an application, Amazon S3 offers a low-cost, scalable model. For large enterprise-class companies that are looking for content collaboration, with multiple uploads and downloads planned across continents, the flat-rate services and enterprise-class multitenancy and support-type solutions from Nirvanix would make more sense.

In fact Nirvanix just rolled out a program for these abandoned Iron Mountain customers. The program migrates data to the Nirvanix public Cloud Storage Network for free (using a new sideloader that Nirvanix engineering designed) and gives them 30 days of unlimited storage capacity for free.So, if you've got 10TBytes or a petabyte of storage sitting on the Iron Mountain cloud, there's an offer on the table from one cloud vendor to get your data to a secure location. Others would be wise to help users who may feel stranded by the Iron Mountain decision to exit.

Regardless of which company you pick--be it Amazon S3, Nirvanix or others--be sure it has built its business as a technology innovator. Cloud innovators have substantial cloud IP. Make them demonstrate this to you. In my opinion, Nirvanix has various forms of cloud--private, hybrid and public, managed and with metered billing, Amazon has a booming public cloud business and excellent integration with its compute side, EC2.

A company like Iron Mountain trying to do storage services is equivalent of Webvan trying to build a IT consulting business to compete with EDS/HP. That just isn't going to happen.

None of the companies mentioned in this blog have been past clients of Tom Trainer, nor do they provide any financial remuneration for mention in this blog, or any other blog site contributed to, or maintained by Tom Trainer.