Iron Mountain

Type:	Public
Industry:	Information Management
Founded:	1951
Founder(s):	Herman Knaust
Headquarters:	745 Atlantic Ave. Boston, MA 02111
Website:	Ironmountain.com
Twitter:	@IronMountain
Key People
Frank Bruno, Director of IPM John Boruvka, Vice President of Sales Mary English, VP of Operations

Iron Mountain is an industry leader in the protection and storage of information, working with both physical and electronic files. 97% of Fortune 1000 companies use Iron Mountain as their information manager.

Iron Mountain was selected by ICANN to function as its Registrar Data Escrow (RDE) agent in November, 2007.

Business Scope and History

The company was started when Herman Knaust decided in 1951 to market the old mine he had purchased to grow mushrooms as a storage facility for important corporate documents.

Iron Mountain now has more than 45 million sq. ft. of storage space in more than 1,000 facilities in 37 countries.

They have been growing and diversifying their business since going public in 1996, and have acquired more than 100 companies throughout their company's history. In 2001, they invested $25 million in their digital archiving business. A year later they acquired Connected Corp. for $117 million and began pushing into the online data backup market. Much of Iron Mountain's growth has been overseen by former CEO Richard Reese, who ran the company from 1981 until 2008; he was succeeded by Robert Brennan. Brennan came to Iron Mountain via its acquisition of Connected Corp.

Iron Mountain and ICANN

ICANN selected Iron Mountain to be the digital escrow agent for its RDE program. This program is designed to secure the Internet's domain name system by protecting important data through Iron Mountain's digital department.

At the time of the agreement in 2008, Iron Mountain immediately made itself available to the more than 900 ICANN-accredited domain name registrars, though any registrar could also choose to use a different third party provider as the escrow agent. ICANN now requires registrars to escrow critical registration data that could then be released to ICANN, should there be a termination of the registrar's accreditation agreement.