Iron Mountain’s RFID-Ready Boxes Make Records Management Easy

Iron Mountain Inc. stores and manages both digital data and paper-based records for 156,000 customers like Paramount Pictures and CSC, and serves vertical markets including health care, banking and retail. They are called Iron Mountain for a reason – they store personal records like medical charts, financial records and business-sensitive documents. Due to the high level of confidential personal information, documents must be very tightly controlled. In fact, regulations require that the company’s clients must be able to verify where the records are at any given time, as well as if and when the documents are destroyed.

To track records easier, stay in compliance and enable quick responses to audits, Iron Mountain has announced that beginning in early 2015, all records storage boxes provided to their customers will feature RFID tags. According to RFID Journal, these RFID-ready boxes provide customers with electronic confirmation that the records are where they should be and can be used at both an Iron Mountain facility and at a customer’s storage location.

Individual records are labeled and then linked to the cartons they’re stored in. Once a tagged item is stored onsite, the unique ID number is encoded to its tag and its carton's tag are stored in Iron Mountain's software, linked to details regarding the records and who owns them. Inventory checks can be performed at periodic intervals, or as requested by customers.

The facilities are several hundred thousand square feet so the storage facilities are equipped with Impinj Speedway readers, as well as mobile carts with Speedway readers onboard. Employees wheel the RFID-enabled cart down the aisles to quickly collect data about all items stored. That information is then provided to the customer.

InSync, an RFID solution provider, came up with this RFID solution and to date has equipped a storage center in London and multiple facilities in the United States to monitor these RFID-ready boxes. These facilities report 100 percent read-rate performance. Using this Item Intelligence solution, mountains of data are made manageable.