Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain

Digital Realty and Iron Mountain are two of the leading players in the data center market.

Digital Realty, mainly through its PlatformDIGITAL offering, serves customers across its broad data center footprint, while Iron Mountain, founded in 1951, sustainably serves leading enterprises across different industries.

See below for a detailed comparison of Digital Realty and Iron Mountain to help you decide which one is better for your data center needs:

Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain: Portfolio

Digital Realty is committed to refreshing and modernizing a brand’s identity. It is engaged in bringing in global brands, so different companies can collaborate, regardless of their size or background industry. As a result, businesses, partners, and creators can work in a fast-paced environment.

Digital Realty maneuvers data centers with the proper controls, processes, and procedures with the aim to meet the bandwidth of the major financial hubs across the globe. It deploys IT services that give flexibility and agility for an institution to work. 

Iron Mountain bridges the gap between digital and physical information. It helps automate a company’s document-centric process and digitizes physical content, creating a rich bank of digitized content and rich media. Through its document scanning expertise, infrastructure, and modern, secure, and cold repository, the brand fetches customer data and information fast and with precision.

Iron Mountain has a series of back-file conversations and a day-forward scanning program, further facilitating the process of scanning and organizing data. It offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and other digital services, like secure logistics, cloud storage, and migration.

Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain: Partners

Digital Realty has earned the trust of industry leader across global regions that have partnered through its Channel Partnership Program. Digital Realty has Alliance Partnerships, Strategic Partnership, and Reseller Partnership programs that help it improve performance, reach, and flexibility.

Several top technology companies partner with Digital Realty through its Channel Program, such as AppSmart, Avant Communication, BCM One, Bridgepointe, Global Communications Networks, and Intelisys. Digital Realty has a Strategic Alliance Partnership with IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Real estate brokers like Avison Young, CBRE, Colliers, NAI Global, and Transwestern help develop solutions for Digital Realty.

Iron Mountain has earned the trust of several leading companies through its various partnership programs. For instance, it has partnerships with real estate brokerages, like CBRE, JLL, Colliers International, and Cushman & Wakefield.

Iron Mountain works with its customers in a collaborative pattern, engaging innovative bodies, like REBA, RE100, and Future of Internet Power in anticipation of tighter regulation, emission trading, third-party audits, or the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI). Iron Mountain does much research and analysis with hardware and software partners in the information and communications technology (ICT) delivery chain.

Iron Mountain has also aligned with the leading interconnection and content providers, like Alibaba, Amazon, and Microsoft to nurture its ecosystem.

Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain: Use Cases

Digital Realty serves many sectors with its services and operates transparently through strategic planning and reporting. It has many use cases across different verticals. Its interconnected data centers help maneuver high-volume and high-traffic markets and support customers’ mission-critical applications by optimizing data centers securely across network services.

Digital Realty handles storing sensitive data with their Telehealth technology in the health care sector. It has well-shaped data centers managed for gamers for the highest quality online gaming. Digital Realty also helps the IT industry with their AI-ready data centers, giving AI global coverage, capacity, and connectivity.

Iron Mountain’s data management services helps customers with tailored and cloud-neutral data solutions. Iron Mountain offers different services, like information governance, data restoration and management, cloud data protection, cloud object storage, and secure offline storage.

It also provides inventory management and reporting services through IM Mobiles and IM Connect. IM Mobiles is a time-saving mobile application that tracks data, and IM Connect secures online access to information.

Iron Mountain protects and activates media archives through Secure Shredding, both off-site and on-site. For Secure IT Asset disposition, it offers solutions like media destruction, e-waste recycling, and IT asset remarketing. Iron Mountain’s Secure Storage solutions include Clean Start, Office Management, Business Storage, Offsite Record Storage, Offsite Tape Vaulting, and Project Services. Tt helps reduce real estate establishment costs and optimize the workplace.

Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain: Ratings

At Glassdoor, Digital Realty secures a 4.1-star rating out of 5. It CEO gets 87% approval, and 83% of users recommend it. People often describe it as a diverse place to work.

By users at G2, Iron Mountain gets a 4 out of 5-star rating. It has an 8.5 on a scale of 10 for its ease of growth and 7.9 for its support quality. At Glassdoor, Iron Mountain has 3.7 stars out of 5, with an 80% CEO approval rating.

Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain: Recognition

Digital Realty earned the NAREIT Leader in The Light award for Data Centers in 2017–2021. Digital Realty was also recognized as a Green Lease Leader in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022. 

Iron Mountain won the Google Cloud Customer Award in 2021. Also, it ranks No. 619 in the Fortune “1000.” Iron Mountain is listed in the FTSE4Good index. In 2017, it was listed in the EPA’s Green Power Leadership Award. It has earned many types of i-SIGMA certifications. It is ISO 27001:2013 certified and also joined the RE100 in 2018 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To make a positive difference in its working community, it has signed the United Nations Global Compact and committed to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Iron Mountain has received a 100% on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index for five consecutive years. Iron Mountain is the top 2022 Disability Equality Index (DEI) scorer. It is a founding member of the Veteran Jobs Mission, which works towards hiring military veterans in the U.S.  In 2021, it also received the SSON Shared Services Award.

Digital Realty vs. Iron Mountain: Overall

Digital Realty provides custom data center solutions for more than 4,300 customers. Its on-time services help businesses build modern and well-equipped infrastructures. Moreover, it has more than 290 data centers spread across 26 countries. 

Many Fortune “1000” companies use Iron Mountain services. It has more than 225,000 customers spread worldwide and operates in over 60 countries. Iron Mountain has more services to offer and is driven to work sustainably. It has a 350 MW+ Sustainable Data Center capacity as well as 70 years of expertise in information management and governance solutions.

Digital Realty and Iron Mountain both offer various leading data center solutions for digital transformation, with Iron Mountain getting the edge in a comparison.