Iron Mountain Anticipates Increase in Work for the Navy Under GPO Contract

ARLINGTON, Va. — An information technology company expects its business with the U.S Department of the Navy to increase as task orders come under a government contract from the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) for document scanning and conversion services.

In late April, the GPO awarded Iron Mountain a contract “to provide off-site document conversion and scanning services for the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA)” the GPO announcement said. “The contract covers a range of services including document preparation, scanning, optical character recognition (OCR), indexing, and output to various media. The estimated value of the contract is not specified, but it indicates 15-25 orders per year, with 5-10 being multi-year efforts, and scanning requirements ranging from 1,000 to 9,000,000 images per order. The contract term is from April 26, 2024, through February 28, 2025, with up to four 12-month option periods.”

“Currently, with the Navy, we are kind of in our infancy in joining and partnering with them,” said Melissa Carson, general manager of Iron Mountain’s Government Solutions Group. “The thing we have with them is the traditional Iron Mountain business, records information management. We have a BPA [blanket purchase agreement] with them, a master agreement with them [the Navy’s records office], to help them with all their record storage needs across the whole naval installation.

Iron Mountain provides records management and storage services to federal, state, and local governments as well as public education institutions. The company, with corporate headquarters in Nashua, New Hampshire, maintains 1,400 sites across the world in 110 countries. The company’s Government Solutions Group is based in Herndon, Virginia.

Carson said the company also has partnered with some of the system integrators and has acquired some other companies.

“We actually have made a couple of acquisitions here in the last couple of years and really have a robust solution that takes all this e-waste within that ecosystem and not only just takes it off their hands securely,” she said. “We’ve got proprietary software that does the data erasure that meets DoD standards off of hard drives, but also with the recent acquisition of Regency, we actually now have a goal of recycling components. We take it down to bare metals and are able to actually only put 8% in the landfill.”

Iron Mountain digitized all of the Veterans Administration’s personnel files, part of which involved digitization of a million boxes of records.

Iron Mountain expects task orders from the Navy similar to its work for the Veterans Administration.

“Iron Mountain can do intelligent document processing with Insight AI [artificial intelligence], with one touch, create the image, classify it for records storage and retention, along with the metadata off of it,” Carson said, noting that her company can pass the data and images back to the agency—the usual scenario–or provide off-site storage.

“We now with this Insight tool, have used the power of AI and machine learning models with natural language models behind it,” she said. “We’re now able to do millions of documents a month with 30% less labor, equipment, and facilities. We’ve been able to absolutely increase that capability and throughput so that one is lower priced — because it was also [prohibitively] expensive for many of these agencies to even start with that — so it’s not only saved that but it’s also eight times faster. So that’s why we’re able to digitize millions [of records] in a month.”

Carson pointed to one example: “For a large financial agency in the government we were able to do a billion images in less than a year at 96% accuracy of pulling data off of these records. The old-fashioned way would have taken 30 years by 800 people.

“Many agencies are finally getting policy changes so that once it is digitized, they do not have to hold on to that paper record,” she said. “Iron Mountain is full-life cycle: “We take it and shred it and we put all of that paper back into the paper industry. We are one of their biggest suppliers to be able to trade with recycled paper.”

The tedious task of scanning documents has led to improvements in scanning technology.

“We’ve been very influential with the scanning equipment suppliers,” Carson said. “We’ve forced them to innovate, too, so there is a particular machine that we’re actually using for the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]. We are actually taking their paper tax returns — so about nine million people still file with paper — and they come in crumpled, with coffee stains and all that. With this new scanning technology, we don’t need to do all of that repair anymore. Literally, it is sensitive enough that you scan it through even with a tear, even with coffee stains, even rumpled, and it looks like a perfectly good piece of paper.”

Iron Mountain even has infrared scanners for fragile old onion-skin paper that never touches the paper.

The company is working to make data storage technology more robust, and “future-proof,” to avoid obsolescence overtaking the technology and ensuring that digital records are accessible and readable. The company also maintains an inventory of obsolete technology in order to read older analog and digital records.