Iron Mountain recently announced that its InSight Digital Experience Platform (DXP) will use MongoDB Atlas and MongoDB Atlas Vector Search for document processing, workflow automation and information governance.
The company's InSight DXP is a product that highlights Iron Mountain's overall transformation. The company has been best known for its shredding and disposable of physical documents, but has expanded into digital services, document lifecycle management and even leasing data centers.
Iron Mountain's revenue for the first six months of 2024 was $3 billion, up 13% from a year ago. Storage rental revenue was $1.8 billion for that time period with services revenue of $1.2 billion.
We caught up with Adam Williams, Vice President of Global Platforms at Iron Mountain, to talk about use of MongoDB and scaling. Here's a look at some of the key takeaways.
The move from physical documents to digital transformation services. Williams said Iron Mountain has housed and digitized many physical assets including microfilm, microfiche and physical assets. "Customers were then asking us 'can you digitize those for us and management them as well?'" said Williams. "That's where we got into content management and repositories."
The decision to build instead of buy. Williams said that Iron Mountain initially used a bevy of vendors in enterprise content management and for content services platforms. "We work with large banks, large insurance companies and government agencies that have petabytes of data. For us to be able to store that data we need to have a very elastic and scalable database," said Williams. Williams said Iron Mountain decided to build on MongoDB's NoSQL and Atlas platform and consolidated a search vendor it was using.
"We were looking for the ability to do more at scale but without the overhead," said Williams, who noted that vector search was also critical. "We entered genAI, so we were able to take Mongo Atlas, search, the vectorization and then those SQL capabilities, and instead of using a patchwork of vendors, we're able to work with a single vendor. But more importantly, we only move the data once. We don't have to move the data three different times to three different places and then pay for it in three different places."
A multicloud architecture. Given Iron Mountain's footprint across the Fortune 500, many customers have data residency requirements. Iron Mountain supports AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, but has stringent multicloud requirements that led to MongoDB instead of separate databases on each cloud, said Williams.
A platform to accommodate multiple customers. InSight DXP's front end and user experience is built by Iron Mountain. Williams explained:
"We have a modern user experience that we built. What's really needed is a user experience is customizable. At Iron Mountain, we deal with a lot of different industries. Our technology strategy with the platform that we built was actually designed out of frustration with all of the different industries that we work for. I found myself as a leader having to work with energy in the morning, healthcare in the afternoon, and then the next day I'm talking to financial services. You end up in this never-ending cycle where you can't be enough to please everybody. By going into platform approach, we're able to create customizable experiences for the different industries. With our updated user interface, we bring workflow, which we've built, and a connector strategy. We also bring in our data processing capability with the intelligent document processing that we've built."
Williams added that Insight DXP can pull in the data whether it's digitized by Iron Mountain or already digitized, transform, extract the metadata and move to workflows with information governance and management. GenAI can be used to gain insights from unstructured data.
The Insight DXP platform includes intelligence document processing with traditional AI and machine learning and internal models. Content management with the ability to absorb documents, edit and manage data and apply governance such as retention schedules and disposition of assets. Customers need audit ready compliance for all documents and data.
- MongoDB rebounds in Q2 with better-than-expected results
- MongoDB adds to Atlas platform, scales partnerships, flexibility
Business models. Iron Mountain charges a subscription for InSight DXP based on number of workflows, document times, number of users, overall size of assets and other metrics. Iron Mountain pays MongoDB based on consumption.
GenAI. Williams said Iron Mountain is building out its genAI product and the challenge is offering those services affordably. "We want to make sure we understand all of the finances behind genAI and we're getting better views from MongoDB on the costs by the different services and the different SKUs," said Williams. Security compliance with genAI is also critical for regulated industries and MongoDB has the controls to understand what data is being shared, he added. Iron Mountain is generally using Microsoft OpenAI since most customers are comfortable with it and there's a data privacy guarantee.
