Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage (SOS)

Solution Guides

Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage (SOS) provides cold storage for long-term data retention and enables organizations to modernize their data management to meet retention requirements and retire legacy infrastructure.

June 17, 20216 mins

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Cost-effective long-term cold storage for your inactive data

Business challenge

In this era of digital transformation, data is growing at an extremely rapid rate. This data is often used for real-time decision making, but regulatory and compliance mandates also require much of it to be retained, sometimes for years, even decades. These greater demands for retention, along with heightened risks of cyberattacks, are creating a pressing need for secure, long-term offline storage. This need must be met while simultaneously balancing storage costs, access requirements and data retention policies.

Iron Cloud solution

What if you could:

Follow best practices for data backup and archiving while also reducing costs, complexity and risk
Modernize data protection for long-term retention and compliance
Increase data security and protect against from ransomware

Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage

Since storing all your data in the cloud can be expensive, Iron Mountain’s Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage (SOS) provides an ultra-low cost, fully-managed solution that moves your inactive data - about 80 percent of the data within your organization - offline and offsite so you can reduce risk, improve security and optimize storage costs.

Offline data is safely kept in a climate-controlled vault, physically isolated from unsecured networks and quickly recoverable based on SLAs. This cold storage approach decreases your storage costs and ensures long-term archival data compliance, while retaining options for fast cloud-based retrieval whenever needed.

Industry fact

100 years
Archival data retention requirements of 100 years or more are now common
Active Archive Alliance, Active Archive and the STate of the Industry 2019, July 2019

How it works

Inactive data can be stored offline using a mix of cloud and tape, so data is retrievable via the cloud but secured in cost effective storage. Here’s how it works:

Data is uploaded from your storage devices (cloud, hard drive, spinning disk, etc.) to a secure object bucket in the Iron Cloud. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Iron Mountain migrates inactive data from the cloud to tape, and then stores the tape in a climate controlled tape vault.
Offline data is brought back online by requesting the data from the secure object bucket. Data is brought back online within 24 hours of the request.

Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage workflow

What you gain

With Iron Cloud SOS, you can keep up with exponential data growth, save on long-term storage costs and improve compliance with retention policies. By placing inactive data on a cost-effective storage tier, and since Iron Mountain doesn’t charge egress fees, you can also make your data more portable and take control of the unstructured data created by your organization. Our technology agnostic approach also means we can work with your cloud providers to create a data management strategy based on your requirements.

Case study

An organization faced rising costs of tape backup infrastructure for archival data and wanted to modernize their data protection strategy. Iron Cloud SOS replaced tape infrastructure with a cloud model for long-term data retention with cost savings on storage, software licenses and hardware.