By Lindsay James |
Industry estimates suggest as much as 80 per cent of enterprise data remains ‘dark’ – uncatalogued and unused information that is scattered across legacy systems or buried in scanned documents and email archives. Meanwhile, just under one per cent of it has made it into AI models.
For Iron Mountain, that gap between what organisations hold and what they can actually use represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Matt Jennings, senior vice president for global sales and strategic partnerships within Iron Mountain’s Digital Business Unit, explains more.
Iron Mountain has built its reputation on physical records storage. Why is data now such a central part of the story?
Organisations still need somewhere secure and compliant to keep their most valuable information. What’s changed is what ‘valuable’ means. Every day, businesses are generating more content, but it’s scattered across systems, or boxed up and effectively invisible. In a world where speed and the use of AI now define competitive advantage, progress doesn’t come from accumulating more information – it comes from unlocking the value in what already exists. We help organisations make that information not only secure, but visible, accessible and ready for AI.
Why is Microsoft Azure such an important part of that shift?
The two things organisations need most right now – trustworthy AI and defensible governance – depend on having a secure, compliant cloud foundation. Iron Mountain InSight DXP runs on Microsoft Azure and uses Azure AI services like Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI to process huge volumes of unstructured content, while inheriting Azure’s enterprise-grade security, resilience and global infrastructure.
Tell us more about InSight DXP. What does it actually do?
At its core, InSight DXP unifies physical and digital records into a trusted data foundation, then applies AI to make that foundation useful. We think about it in three stages: protect, connect and activate. Protect is about secure storage, chain of custody and compliance – applying retention, privacy and audit controls, whether a record is a paper file from 1995 or a document created this morning. Connect is about transforming unstructured content – digitising physical material, classifying documents and extracting the data buried inside them. And activate is where the value really shows up: AI-powered search, automated workflows and agentic AI that can handle high-volume, repetitive tasks while keeping a human in the loop for anything that needs review.
Iron Mountain’s Digital Business Unit team is helping customers in various industries make the most of their data
Regulated industries like financial services and healthcare come up a lot in the Iron Mountain messaging. Why are they such a strong fit?
These are the industries where the stakes are highest on both sides of the equation – the cost of getting compliance wrong and the value of getting AI right. We’ve worked with banks and insurers to help automate document classification, data extraction and validation across claims, mortgage, underwriting and credit workflows, which has meant faster decisions and fewer errors at scale. This was recently recognised when we achieved the Microsoft Solutions Partner with AI Certified Software designation for Financial Services. In healthcare, we’ve digitised and centralised 2.5 million pension records for one healthcare organisation, adding AI-driven metadata and validation workflows, which delivered around US$2 million in annual savings along with faster claims processing and audit-ready compliance.
What does ‘AI-ready data’ actually mean in practice?
AI-ready doesn’t just mean digitised. It means the data has consistent metadata, clear access controls, a defensible chain of custody and retention policies – so that when an organisation feeds it into a model, they know where it came from, who’s allowed to see it, and that it supports adherence to applicable regulatory requirements.
We also give customers real control over how their data is used to train the AI within their own instance of InSight DXP. Your competitive edge isn’t AI in the abstract – it’s your data, and models trained on your own data will always outperform models trained on the world’s data. Getting that foundation right is what makes the rest of the AI conversation possible.
Where is the partnership between Iron Mountain and Microsoft headed next?
It’s about deeper integration and broader reach. We’re continuing to build out InSight DXP’s use of Azure-native AI capabilities, and we’re expanding the use cases we support on Azure – from content management and digital pathology through to large-scale data restoration and migration. But the underlying goal doesn’t change: we want to be the partner that helps organisations move from fragmented, document-heavy environments to a secure, unified, AI-ready information platform.
Discover more insights from experts at Microsoft Partner businesses in the Autumn 2026 issue of Technology Record. To get content like this on a regular basis, subscribe to the print edition or free digital edition of the quarterly Technology Record magazine.