New Iron Mountain Digital Data/Document Management Service Leverages MongoDB Atlas

Iron Mountain’s InSight Digital Experience Platform, built on MongoDB Atlas, provides unified asset management services that span both digital data and physical documents.

Information and document management service provider Iron Mountain has launched a new service for managing both digital information and paper documents based on the MongoDB Atlas database and MongoDB Atlas Vector Search software, the two companies said this week.

Iron Mountain said the new InSight Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provides a unified asset management system for intelligent document processing, workflow automation and information governance tasks.

The MongoDB-Iron Mountain relationship is an example of how the database developer – and the move to cloud computing in general – are extending the traditional boundaries of the channel to include service providers who incorporate IT products within their service offerings.

“We have a key partnership with [MongoDB] because we're early adopters of all of these services,” said Adam Williams, vice president of global platforms at Iron Mountain, highlighting the key attributes of the MongoDB Atlas database during an interview with CRN. “For Mongo Atlas, we were one of the first customers to be running at this scale.”

“If we were to develop all these capabilities ourselves at Iron Mountain, we would be launching this product five years from now,” Williams said of the advantage of building InSight DXP on the MongoDB Atlas platform. “This is really allowing us to move quickly and be able to deploy this capability this year, as opposed to having to do all of these different services ourselves. We're really able to do this at scale and accelerate our development.”

MongoDB has established itself as one of the leading next-generation database developers – particularly with its cloud-based Atlas database and developer platform. New additions to MongoDB’s product and service offerings, including its Atlas Vector Search and Atlas Search Nodes software and its MongoDB AI Applications Program, have positioned the company as a significant player in the current wave of generative AI application development.

Iron Mountain, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a long-time provider of information management services, including securely storing physical documents and operating data centers for digital data archiving and life-cycle management.

Williams says the problem Iron Mountain is addressing with the new InSight DXP service is that many businesses and organizations – especially those in highly regulated industries – remain heavily reliant on paper documents as part of their organizational processes. Those documents are often unsorted, making it difficult to find and access the data they contain for governance, reporting and data analysis tasks.

Digital information, meanwhile, often has little or no indexing, making it difficult for organizations to find data when they need it, and correlate and validate that data with information within physical documents.

Williams said that creates challenges for document-centric business processes such as contract reviews. It also hinders unified information asset management efforts – making it difficult to determine whether data and documents meet an organization’s retention policies and to identify redundant or obsolete data that should be purged.

Working With Digital Data And Physical Documents

InSight DXP, a modular, AI-driven, low-code software-as-a-service platform, uses the MongoDB Atlas database and data service capabilities to transform unstructured information within physical documents and digital data into structured, actionable data, according to a description of the service in a news release from the two companies.

InSight DXP provides clients with a unified, customizable platform to access, manage, govern and monetize both digital information and physical documents. The platform’s tools automate manual processes, enable audit-ready compliance and make data more easily accessible.

The service integrates digitized documents with key business processes and systems via pre-built connectors or application programming interfaces. That enables business users to quickly design, build, and publish solutions with comprehensive physical and digital content management, intelligent document processing, workflow automation, and information governance capabilities, the companies said.

Williams also highlighted the importance of the system’s ability, using pre-built connectors and integrations, to move digital data back into clients’ own operational systems, such as ERP and CRM applications.

The Iron Mountain service leverages “MongoDB's flexible document model and scalable architecture to handle the diverse and complex structures of both physical and digital information” across multiple vertical industries, according to the news release. That allows for rapid ingestion and processing of various data types including text, images, and metadata.

Williams said the flexibility of the MongoDB database allows Iron Mountain to “extend and modify” data schemas to meet customers’ changing data needs without impacting the user experience or having to rebuild and redeploy solutions. MongoDB’s scalability and ability to handle billions of objects is another key attribute, he said, as are the vector database capabilities for developing GenAI algorithms.

Vertical Industry Services

In addition to InSight DXP’s core data processing service Iron Mountain has also developed industry-specific applications for banking, healthcare and other industries, as well as cross-industry applications such as human resources and invoice processing. The service also provides dashboards, process transparency, and customizable workflows and reporting.

Williams said the relationship with MongoDB went beyond technical assistance. “Here, we've truly built a platform and MongoDB is a big part of that, because we're able to build an adaptable platform that we can use to meet the needs of all these different solutions, as opposed to building one application for each one of these. MongoDB gave us their expertise and support in getting this off the ground.”

Williams made clear that Iron Mountain is using MongoDB Atlas as the foundation for the InSight DXP service: It isn’t reselling or licensing the product to customers in any way. The database, he said, operates in the background and is invisible to clients.

“Businesses undergoing digital transformation typically find themselves in a delicate position where they need to move quickly, but need to do so in a predictable, cost-effective, and secure manner. This is especially true for companies in regulated industries that have to adhere to strict compliance requirements,” said Sahir Azam, MongoDB chief product officer, in a statement. The collaboration with Iron Mountain provides that company “with the security and flexibility they need to help their customers take advantage of generative AI technology to modernize their businesses.”