Iron Mountain Feels the Heat

Records management and data protection specialist Iron Mountain is still counting the cost of fires earlier this month that destroyed a facility in London, England, and damaged another in Ottawa, Canada, within the space of 24 hours.

Documents belonging to the City of Ottawa, as well as other local organizations, were stored at the Canadian site, although officials are unsure about the impact of the blaze. "We're still in the process of figuring out what may be missing or not," says Eric Collard, a spokesman for the City of Ottawa, adding that officials are working closely with Iron Mountain.

According to Collard, the City stored more than 3 million file folders at the Iron Mountain facility, contained in around 122,000 boxes. The City, however, told Byte and Switch that it is also planning to deploy an electronic content management system from Stellent, which is currently in pilot mode.

The 69,000 square foot Ottawa facility, like the London site, held paper records, although Melissa Mahoney, Iron Mountain's director of corporate communications, told Byte and Switch that only 3 percent of the total records stored in Ottawa were damaged by the fire, and less than half a percent were actually destroyed.

There doesn't appear to be any connection betwen the two fires. According to Mahoney, early indications from an official investigation into the Ottawa fire suggest that it was caused by roofing contractors working on the facility. According to press reports, 75 firefighters were required to bring the Ottawa fire under control.The following day, another fire struck an Iron Mountain site in Bromley-by-Bow in London. The 126,000 square-foot, six-storey site stored archival and inactive business records for organizations in and around the U.K. capital. More than 100 firefighters reportedly tackled the blaze, described as one of the largest handled by the London Fire Brigade this year.

The impact of the London fire was also much more severe than the situation in Ottawa. Although Mahoney would not confirm how many actual records were held at either site, she told Byte and Switch that there was a "total loss" at the U.K. fire. "The cause of the [London] fire is still under investigation," she adds. "We're working with the local authorities, and we have also [hired] independent investigators." The vendor has also stepped up security at its 63 other U.K. facilities, according to the exec.

Mahoney told Byte and Switch that it was "probably too early" to assess the financial impact of the fires. "At the end of the day, we're just very grateful that nobody was hurt."

This is not the first time that Iron Mountain has hit the headlines for lost data. Last year, the vendor got into hot water after tapes from Time Warner went missing on their way to an Iron Mountain facility. (See A Tale of Lost Tapes, The Year in Insecurity, and Iron Mountain Keeps Truckin'.)

The recent events in Canada and the U.K. also underline the vulnerability of off-site archiving, a market which Iron Mountain dominates. Recently, the vendor has looked to boost its presence in the online backup space, snapping up LiveVault late last year. (See Iron Mountain to Buy LiveVault, and Iron Mountain Lands LiveVault.)In a nutshell, an increasing number of IT professionals, chiefly in companies too small to run their own elaborate backup schemes, are turning to online backup offerings to preserve data for future reference and restoral in the event of a disaster. Certainly, a recent Byte and Switch Insider report highlighted the popularity of these services, as demonstrated by customers' willingness to pay a premium for them. (See Online Backup Services: Weighing Their Worth.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch