The long-standing secure storage business needed a rebrand to reflect its changing digital services that came to the fore last year
As the COVID crisis revealed the critical need for businesses to have a strong digital strategy in order to evolve and meet new demands, Iron Mountain knew the time was right for a rebrand.
The new branding expresses the organisation's role as both the lock and key to leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to digitise and find the value contained in customer data never before available.
“We knew among the vast information we stored on behalf of our customers existed insights to unlock and access that had never before been seen and were unbeknownst to them. For this reason, we as a business have evolved to not only be the lock but also key to unlocking the value of our customers' data,” Iron Mountain A/NZ MD, Greg Lever, told CMO.
The 70-year-old business is built around trust and the storage of physical information and disaster recovery. Iron Mountain protects some of the world’s most valuable artefacts, ranging from the original Frank Sinatra recordings to information on the US Federal Government's employee retirement plans. In Australia, it stores over 20 million cartons, 500 million files and 3.8 million media and tapes.
As the world evolved to become more digital, so too has Iron Mountain, opening up data centres globally to help organisations securely store physical and digital data as well as provide a secure and responsible way of destroying data once it is no longer needed.
“It’s been customer-led: We're solving for their problems in the digital transformation of these organisations,” Lever said.
What the recent global and Australian rebrand reflects is the next shift from data storge and management to data accessibility.
According to Lever, many of the traditional services Iron Mountain had been providing almost ceased during the height of the COVID crisis last year. "As organisations worked out how they we’re going to operate, we had to be able to provide different solutions so they could get information back to their customers when most people were working from home,” he said.
In response, the business came up with different solutions to disseminate the information businesses still required to operate while working across a whole raft of different places.
Iron Mountain knows first-hand a digital platform able to run analytics is one of the great benefits of having digital information. “It allows organisations to make faster decisions and improve the speed to market and have an advantage there,” Lever said.
“There are certain sectors in Australia well down the digitisation path in all the areas that matter most to them. We are seeing the cost to do that transformation continue to decrease over time. And more organisations are getting the appropriate funding to work through that process.”
Iron Mountain now has seven key areas of focus it sees unlocking the greatest value for customers as they digitally transform. These include an AI-driven content service platform bringing physical and digital content together, secure offline stories, secure IT asset disposition, consumer and SME storage management, fine arts and entertainment services, and managed data centre facilities.
Government, finance, healthcare - each sector boasts of organisations with very different customers sets and services. And in terms of customer intelligence, there are many distinct considerations when determining how and what to digitise to maximise insights.
According to Lever, what information matters most, the speed of access to information, factoring in previous or older physical records in the modern digital-driven customer profile and cost are some of these considerations. As he pointed out, organisations typically have a hybrid set-up of records and business information arrangement. There is new digital information data sets along with legacy, paper-based records.
Without any significant external pressue to move or amalgamate these assets, digital transformation of such data sets was less of a priority for many organisations. Then COVID hit.
According to Lever, the crisis forced an entirely new and unexpected urgency in the digital transformation plans of so many organisations. It may not have been sink or swim, but more likely digitise or die, he said.
"Organisations were spending a lot of time and effort trying to work through how they reconcile their solution set-up to have both physical and digital input,” Lever said.
Thanks to the global pandemic, the digital transformation journey for most organisations and their customers has become much faster and more focused. The sudden shift to workforces operating from home en masse was a key trigger in demand for digital migration. One example is a mailroom solution service, which saw a 200 per cent increase in activity through the first three months of COVID.
With very few organisations boasting of physical-only or digital-only information storage, Lever said Iron Mountain's approach is to develop an appropriate solution and deliver it, whether it’s integrated into its system or within the system customers have access to.
“It doesn't matter where our customers information is coming from, whether it's in an Iron Mountain warehouse, on a tape, in the cloud or on the customer’s content services platform, our role is to enable them to speed that data across every one of those formats,” he added.
Iron Mountain's rebrand includes adopting the new tagline, 'Climb Higher', a fresh logo and importantly a new purpose: 'To be our customers’ most trusted partner for protecting and unlocking value from what matters most in innovative and socially responsible ways.'
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