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http://www.mimosasystems.com/html/news-pr-mimosa-systems-acquired-by-iron-mountain-02-22-10.htm

Iron Mountain Adds All-in-One, On-Premises Archive to Complement its Cloud Offerings; Company Now Capable of Managing Information Wherever it Resides

BOSTON (Feb. 22, 2010) – Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), an information management services company, today announced it has acquired Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa Systems, Inc., a leader in enterprise-class content archiving solutions, for approximately $112 million in cash, subject to closing adjustments. The deal provides Iron Mountain with an integrated archive for email, SharePoint data and files, and gives the company an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives.

The ability to archive and manage data both onsite, inside the customer’s firewall, and remotely in the cloud makes Iron Mountain a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management. It also provides the company’s customers with greater flexibility and choice for managing their information.

Additionally, the company can now capture and manage a broader range of enterprise information from so-called “edge-of-the-network” devices like desktop PCs and laptops as well as from company repositories like email stores, SharePoint servers and file systems. Many larger businesses still prefer to keep this data on their premises today. Finally, the acquisition allows Iron Mountain to extract intelligence from the information it manages both on-premises and in the cloud, advancing the company’s larger strategy to help enterprises lower the costs and risks associated with storing and managing information.

“We’re really excited about adding Mimosa Systems,” said Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain. “We acquired Mimosa because we believe it offers the best archiving technology on the market, and the company shares our philosophy to help customers reduce the cost and risk of storing and managing information. By combining Mimosa’s on-premises archive with our cloud-based technologies, Iron Mountain can now store, recover and discover digital content wherever it resides. This is a great example of the type of technology acquisition that fits well within our long-term growth strategy.”

Mimosa NearPoint™ is an enterprise archiving platform with applications for retention and disposition, eDiscovery, compliance supervision, classification, recovery, and end-user search, enabling customers to reduce risk, and lower their eDiscovery and storage costs. Mimosa has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and is recognized by industry analysts as a fast-growing, visionary archiving company.

“Enterprises today are buried in email and other forms of user-generated content, making information storage and management a complex, expensive and risky exercise,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group. “This deal strengthens Iron Mountain’s position in the market as a comprehensive provider of information management solutions. Its customers now have greater flexibility to store and manage their information onsite or in the cloud, where it makes sense for their budget and business.”

NearPoint joins a broad portfolio of content archiving, data protection and recovery, and eDiscovery solutions from Iron Mountain Digital. Customers wanting to archive email can now choose either NearPoint for onsite archiving or Iron Mountain’s Total Email Management Suite, powered by Mimecast® technology, for archiving email in the cloud. Additionally, customers can use Iron Mountain’s Digital Record Center® for Compliant Messaging for email that must meet SEC regulations and supervision.

The addition of the NearPoint content archive also offers customers an enhanced eDiscovery solution set for quickly finding content and applying legal holds across email, file and SharePoint data. For larger litigation matters, organizations can easily transfer their onsite data to Iron Mountain’s cloud solution, Stratify Legal Discovery® Service. For smaller matters or in instances where companies want to begin the eDiscovery process on their own, they can do so onsite with Iron Mountain’s early-case assessment tool for eDiscovery, eVantage™.

The Mimosa team will be retained and become an integral part of Iron Mountain Digital. The president and CEO of Mimosa Systems, T. M. Ravi, will assume the role of chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital, responsible for all marketing functions and helping to drive strategy planning and execution for Iron Mountain Digital.

“It’s a win-win situation for our customers and partners who can now leverage Iron Mountain’s global reach and comprehensive information management services,” said T.M. Ravi. “The Mimosa team will play a key role in the development and execution of the company’s cloud and on-premises information management strategy.”

About Mimosa
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation email, file and SharePoint archiving solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa NearPoint is the industry’s most comprehensive unstructured information management software solution for email, files, collaboration systems and instant messages, enabling archiving, eDiscovery, storage management, and recovery in a unified solution. Mimosa is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recognized for its competencies in networking infrastructure solutions, ISV/software solutions, and advanced infrastructure solutions.

About Iron Mountain Digital

Iron Mountain Digital is the world’s leading provider of information management services for data protection and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery and intellectual property management. The technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to thousands of companies around the world, directly and through a worldwide network of channel partners. Iron Mountain Digital is based in Southborough, Mass.

About Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The Company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions, along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain is a trusted partner to more than 140,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit the Company’s Web site at www.ironmountain.com.

I will be hosting a Bird of a Feather roundtable next week during Teched in Los Angeles, CA .. and it might be nice to meet you if you are going.

BOF02 Regulatory Compliance, Archiving, and Electronic Discovery with Microsoft Exchange Server
Mon 5/11 | 2:45 PM-4:00 PM | Room 501A

Birds-of-a-Feather, Microsoft® Exchange Server

Regulatory compliance has become a core requirement for many companies. Producing e-mail evidence for courts or regulatory organizations can be challenging, given the massive volumes of data, the intricacies of the legal process, and the disparity that often exists between legal and IT departments. We discuss the compliance functionality in Microsoft Exchange Server, such as archiving and electronic discovery, complementary needs for companies wishing to be proactive in compliance. Come and share the solutions you’ve found to assist in dealing with Exchange compliance.

Speaker Bio:

Martin Tuip is a nine-time Microsoft® MVP for Exchange Server. He started his IT career in system administration, but has gone on to focus most of his career on archiving and compliance products. Martin is the webmaster of several resource sites and discussion groups for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint and regularly speaks on email archiving and Exchange Server.

I don’t always just nitpick on individual products or features, but for the last few weeks I’ve been really thinking about how we as a society are going to preserve our electronic heritage. We all can walk to our local museum that proudly will display documents, books and other written manuscripts but how will this preservation be done for our electronic digital records. Preserving records has been defined as:

“the planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies necessary to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable”. 

Additionally authenticity may be added to this definition.  According to a paper written by Det Norske Veritas called “SURVIVABILITY OF DIGITAL RECORDS” digital preservation addresses hardware (e.g. storage media, reading and processing hardware), software (e.g. reading and processing), data models (e.g. file formats, preservation metadata) and involved processes (e.g. migration or conversion procedures, emulation strategies, obsolescence detection, quality assurance, and all kind of documentations). A digital record is defined as a record created or received and/or maintained by means of digital computer technology. A digital record is thereby not just the digital equivalent of a paper document but can virtually be anything that can be created and stored on a computer. In this respect digital records are not tangible objects but a combination of hardware, software and computer files. This combination is necessary to be able to use the records. The digital record “lives” (i.e. is only useful within a software environment) but is consigned to a physical carrier medium for storage. This dual nature of digital records tremendously complicates the long term survival problem. It both requires addressing the physical media and its durability or lack thereof, i.e. storage media and hardware equipment, and it requires maintaining a suitable living condition for the record, i.e. the program and/or operating system. No wonder the survival of digital records for decades or centuries is yet an unresolved problem.

Microsoft announced on April 14, 2009 the beta release availability of Exchange 2010 (known under the code name of Exchange 14).  Exchange 2010 will be the successor of Exchange 2007 in the future.  This isn’t the final release of the product as that is slated for the second half of this year for now and which might change.

What is notably new in this release?

 You can download Beta 1 from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1898ed2c-2f88-48ac-824e-d3d20fad77d7

Source: http://www.arma.org/news/enewsletters/index.cfm?ID=3449

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that Google may be making deceptive claims about the security of documents stored in its Gmail and Google Docs services. The complaint cites an error that allowed users to access documents without proper permission. Google contends the error affected only users who had already shared documents and involved less than .5% of all documents held. EPIC also claims that, while Google promises secure data storage, the company’s terms of service note that it is not liable for harm. EPIC is urging the FTC to investigate.

Any of the SaaS vendors recently taken a look at their Terms of Service?

This week I’m attending both the MVP Summit and the Microsoft CIO Summit in Redmond, WA (a busy week juggling my normal job duties with a few conferences to work at).  At my employer we have several MVPs, who each are experts in their specific field.

Each year, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are invited to attend the MVP Global Summit at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle and at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and this year it is held from March 1 through 4. Invitations were also extended to Regional Directors (RDs) and allows for providing feedback to Microsoft and insight into product releases through private meetings with product groups.  I particlarly enjoy the MVP summit as the content generally goes beyond what you might see at other conferences, plus the interaction with notable experts in the messaging field is valuable.

Due to restrictions I can’t elaborate on what particarly is discussed at the Summit.

This question on one of the Microsoft forums sparked my curiousity:

 http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistahardware/thread/720108ee-0a9c-4090-b62d-bbd5cb1a7605

Particularly this section got me wondering:

“I’ve noticed that as I copy data/install programs on my Laptop, the weight of the Laptop increases. My ask, what is the weight/file ratio? So for example, how many GB’s = 6oz?”    

Just before I was about to enjoy my first days off on vacation since September of 2007, I saw the news about Heartland Payment Systems suffering from a major breach.   About 250,000 companies leverage the payment services of Heartland and millions of creditcard numbers got stolen.   The whole SaaS archiving thing is something I understand, but also am concerned about for something that might not be as obvious to some.

At Heartland, the hackers went after creditcard information.  Why at Heartland?  Well … there were about a 100 million of them in one place .. once they got in .. they basically got the motherload .. no need to go after the small stuff right?  The deal with SaaS archiving is about the same.  About 75-80% of corporate IP is in email these days.  Its not just your ‘I’m going to lunch’ invite anymore. People are exchanging contracts, blueprints, personal/business records and who knows what more in email.  It is the defacto standard .. its all there.

When you are thinking about one company .. it might not be such a big deal .. once you start to put all of the corporate IP of lets say .. 4,000, or 10,000 .. or maybe 20,000 companies all in one bucket … we are all of a sudden creating this enormous honeypot of extremely valuable information right there and then.   Now .. I pretty much expect that all hosting companies are going to fall over this article and claim that customers data is secure and that data is encrypted and in a sense they are right … Heartland Financial also says that they provide “Technologically advanced security that safeguards personal and account information“.   Those smart enough all know that encryption is just a fancy word for “It will take longer for you to read it”.

My concern is simply that cyberterrorists might not simply want to go after our creditcard numbers, but opt to go after our bucket of corporate IP instead (especially when so much of it will be all in one place).

Out of Office replies can cause security risks that you aren’t aware off. For instance someone might find out that you are going to be on vacation for 2 weeks and not be home.  This article posts another problem with Out of Office replies:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7702913.stm

For those in the US I would like to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving .. hope you can spend it with friends and family.