Since 1951, Iron Mountain Inc. has been focused on paper retention, and the 70-year-old firm has made a transition to the Digital Age as well.

The company now operates in 58 countries with 730 million cubic feet of volume held in over 1,400 facilities. It provides storage and information management services that include a significant artificial intelligence and machine learning component to generate value from a mountain of information.

“The transformation has been going from physical records management that we’ve built our business around to evolving with our customers and work with all of the digital documents,” said Adam Williams (pictured, right), senior director for technology architecture at Iron Mountain. “We’ve developed a SaaS platform for digitizing, classifying and unlocking the value of our customers’ data and putting that data to work.”

Williams spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. He was joined by Som Shahapurkar (pictured, left), head of AI/ML and senior director for global product engineering at Iron Mountain, and they discussed training machine learning models to correctly identify different documents, as well as the company’s use of the cloud for key customer projects. (* Disclosure below.)

Enhanced computer vision

Storing a mass of data is just one piece of the puzzle. Being able to recognize the difference between a prescription and a purchase order at scale is another part of the challenge, and it forms the technology solution that Iron Mountain provides today.

“You can look at a document and know this is an invoice or a prescription; you don’t even have to read that,” Shahapurkar said. “Machines are now capable of having that computer vision to say whether it is a prescription or invoice. We train those models and have them do it at industrial scale.”

Iron Mountain leverages technology from Amazon Web Services Inc. for a variety of customer solutions. In 2020, the two firms collaborated on a project to store, transcode and publish highlights from TV’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and its 2,725-episode library.

“Our customers require us to have highly secure, highly trusted environments in the cloud,” Williams said. “The ability to do that with data sovereignty is really important. We’re able to meet that with AWS as well.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Iron Mountain Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Iron Mountain nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE