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Responsive website, environmentally responsible approach
More than 250,000 companies in 66 countries trust Iron Mountain to store and protect their most valuable assets. The company wanted to make sure that continued international expansion wouldn’t slow down the performance of its customer portal, Iron Mountain Connect™. By caching the website on the Akamai Intelligent Edge, Iron Mountain keeps the website fast, even for customers located thousands of miles from its Pennsylvania data center. And by hosting Akamai edge servers in Iron Mountain colocation facilities, which are powered by 100% green energy certified through Iron Mountain’s Green Power Pass program, the companies are scaling together in an environmentally sustainable way.
Making sure the website loads quickly in every corner of the world
Iron Mountain’s ultra-secure storage facilities around the world hold a trove of digital and physical assets. Tape backups of critical records. Medical and geological samples. Fine art. Raw materials, finished goods, and more. “Our customers trust us to safely store their assets,” says Nerina Martinez, Digital Experience Leader. “They also trust us to provide an excellent experience when they request services — and to run our business in an environmentally sustainable way.”
That excellent online experience falls largely to Gordon Senzer, Principal Engineer and Enterprise Architect. An Iron Mountain team member since 2007, Senzer designed and managed the underpinning for Iron Mountain Connect™, the secure online customer portal where customers can search through their inventory; locate what they need; and arrange for delivery, shredding, or other services. “A customer placing a critical order expects our website to load quickly, even if they’re on the other side of the world from our data center,” Senzer says.
Web performance held steady as Iron Mountain grew, and the leadership team wanted to make sure it stayed that way as the company continued to expand internationally. “Our tests showed that web pages almost always loaded quickly in locations far from our data center, but even one timeout is too many,” Senzer says. “Our goal is continuous improvement, and we want every customer to have a good experience on our website, every time.”
Solution: hosting the customer portal near customers
Senzer found his solution in the Akamai Intelligent Edge, which includes more than 4,200 locations in 136 countries. Pages are cached in locations near customers. “A robust content- delivery network is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve the customer experience,” Senzer says. “As soon as we started using Akamai, web page timeouts essentially disappeared.”
Working with Akamai Professional Services, Senzer started by moving nearly two dozen of the company’s global marketing websites to the edge in 2009. “Those accelerated pages load faster than they did before we started using Akamai, giving prospective customers a favorable first impression,” says Hue Han, Software Engineering Manager. “Many more marketing websites have been added and accelerated with Akamai Professional Services’ help over the years and their support has been very prompt and reliable — a winning combination.”
Next, Senzer added the customer portal, Iron Mountain Connect™. Before-and-after performance statistics tell the story. Approximately 55% of all web page requests are fulfilled at the Akamai edge, offloading Iron Mountain’s data center in Philadelphia. Overall data center traffic dropped by 80%. Pages load up to 77% faster in Brazil and 11% faster in Australia.
“The longest a customer anywhere in the world waits for the website to load is about two seconds. Akamai helps us deliver a world-class customer experience around the globe — without having to re-engineer or move our primary data center in Pennsylvania. Support calls about response time have essentially disappeared.”
Gorden Senzer, Principal Engineer and Enterprise Architect, Iron Mountain
Easy on the IT team
Senzer views the relationship with Akamai as a partnership and a learning opportunity. “During deployment, the Akamai team showed us what to do and also advised us on a more reliable network configuration and certificate management,” he says. “I’m not a network specialist and I haven’t programmed for years, but I can make the Akamai solution work without breaking a sweat.”
Impressed with the intuitive nature of the security platform, Senzer and Han are now adding more Akamai security solutions. “When you find a solution that works the way you expect it to, adoption is a lot easier,” says Senzer. “We found our solution in Akamai.”
Symbiotic sustainability
There is more color to the partnership between the two companies — and it’s green. “Iron Mountain and Akamai share a commitment to sustainable operations that benefits both of our companies, our customers, and the planet,” Martinez says. Iron Mountain’s colocation data centers have been operating on 100% certified green power since 2017.
The Akamai-managed services Iron Mountain uses are partly hosted in two of these data centers: New Jersey and Haarlem, Netherlands. As part of its commitment to 100% renewably sourced energy and carbon neutrality by 2030, Akamai used innovative cooling technology to cool the New Jersey facility with outside air, using no water. In combination, solar power and air cooling make the facilities 15% to 20% more efficient than a typical wholesale data center, with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) value of approximately 1.2. When 90% full, the data center in New Jersey accounts for about 4% of Akamai’s total U.S. electricity load and about 3% of its global load.
With this arrangement, both companies attest to the other’s use of renewable energy. “It’s symbiotic,” says Martinez. “Iron Mountain uses Akamai’s green-managed service to run the business in a sustainable and socially responsible way. And we give Akamai a ‘Green Power Pass,’ an annual certificate of attestation validating that 100% of the green power they use in our facilities is acceptable in external reporting.”
“Our purpose is to be our customers’ most trusted partner for protecting and unlocking the value of what matters most to them in innovative and socially responsible ways. Our relationship with Akamai helps us do better for our customers on both counts.”
Nerina Martinez, Digital Experience Leader, Iron Mountain
About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) is the global leader in innovative storage and information management services, storing and protecting billions of valued assets, including critical business information, highly sensitive data, and cultural and historical artifacts. Founded in 1951 and trusted by more than 225,000 customers worldwide, Iron Mountain helps customers CLIMB HIGHERTM to transform their businesses. Through a range of services including digital transformation, data centers, secure records storage, information management, secure destruction, and art storage and logistics, Iron Mountain helps businesses bring light to their dark data, enabling customers to unlock value and intelligence from their stored digital and physical assets at speed and with security, while helping them meet their environmental goals.
To learn more about Iron Mountain, please visit: www.IronMountain.com and follow @IronMountain on Twitter and LinkedIn.