Merger Mania: What To Do with ose Tapes

A few weeks ago, I met with a customer whose business model incorporated an aggressive M&A strategy. This company had the integration process down to a science. As a result, they showed consistently strong growth from this part of their business; however, they frequently faced a challenge accessing and maintaining backup data from newly acquired companies. While they used a standard model for integrating and migrating production applications, the process of managing legacy tape backup was more difficult.

Backup is a critical component of every company's IT operations; however, it is typically a highly customized process. Every organization makes unique choices about backup applications, backup hardware, backup strategies and policies. An acquiring company must understand how their acquisition target backs up data and how to integrate the processes into the parent's infrastructure. The typical strategy is to maintain the legacy environment during the integration period. Once IT systems are fully migrated, the legacy backup environment is shut down, but is still maintained for some period of time to ensure that access to legacy backup data is maintained. At some point in the future, the older infrastructure is retired. Our customer used this strategy successfully, but the team was frustrated with the challenge of maintaining multiple legacy backup environments and the associated burden of cost and maintenance of internal knowledge on outdated systems. The customer indicated that in practice they rarely had to access the legacy data, but had to maintain it for business reasons. Fortunately, Iron Mountain had a solution.

Iron Mountain's Archive Tape Management solution addresses this problem. Archive Tape Management provides end users with the ability to consolidate multiple silos of tape catalogues down to one which can be viewed online via the web. Thus, if a customer wants to access legacy data, he/she can go to the Archive Tape Management web interface and find the tape that contains the needed information. Once the tape is identified, the user can either request that Iron Mountain deliver the tape or that Iron Mountain recover the data for the customer. By using the technology, organizations can retire legacy systems and save money.

Our customer was enthusiastic about Archive Tape Management and the ability to retire their unneeded backup infrastructure. They were also excited about the possibility of accessing legacy data using Iron Mountain's Data Restoration services and thus freeing their IT teams to focus in other areas. Finally, it also made financial sense because they could stop paying for maintenance on their retired backup hardware and software.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/data-backup-and-recovery/merger-mani...
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