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Iron Mountain sustainable solutions: Smart Sort
Solution Guides
Achieve your sustainability goals through innovative, cost-effective solutions that also protect and manage your information.
Business challenge
Organizations are increasingly challenged with embedding sustainable and responsible practices across all facets of their operations, including records and information management.
The volume, velocity, and variety of information that organizations need to manage, store, and protect can be overwhelming. In addition, shifting business processes and staff changes can lead to challenges in identifying legacy records. These factors not only slow sustainability efforts but can increase risk and drive higher costs.
What if you could
- Ensure that your records and information management program is compliant with your organization’s retention policies and regulatory requirements
- Automate decision-making while accelerating the process of sorting and organizing your paper files
- Improve file-level visibility
- Eliminate the over-retention of paper records
- Support environmental goals related to a circular economy and responsible procurement
Iron Mountain Smart Sort
Smart Sort is a technology-enabled solution that leverages your organization’s records retention policies to sort and organize files according to destruction eligibility, record type, or other unique categories. At the conclusion of your Smart Sort project, you’ll have full file-level visibility into your inventory and can confidently determine—now or in the future—what to retain, defensibly destroy, or digitize. You’ll also be able to provide the necessary records for audits, legal matters, divestitures, or other business needs.
With Smart Sort, you can establish a process to eliminate the over-retention of records and simplify future decisions.
Smart Sort’s process is straight-forward and sustainable:
- Iron Mountain’s staff of trained professionals use our proprietary software and workflows to automate decision-making while accelerating the process of sorting and organizing your records.
- During the sorting process, Iron Mountain will move files into Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified boxes, helping to support organizational goals related to responsible procurement.
- All boxes and files identified for destruction are then processed via Iron Mountain’s NAID AAA+ certified secure shredding workflow, ensuring data privacy. Shredded files are recycled, supporting a circular economy.
How Smart Sort works:
Featured services & solutions
Smart Sort
Efficiently unmingle your commingled files—all without a complex, labor-intensive discovery project
Smart Records Cleanup Suite
A suite of solutions for your records inventory
Sustainable solutions
At Iron Mountain, we strive to be our customers’ most trusted partner for protecting and unlocking the value of what matters most to them in innovative and socially responsible ways
Example of an average Smart Sort engagement
Pre-project:
- 27,000 boxes of files stored with mixed retention requirements
Post-project results:
- 19,000 boxes of files sorted by retention requirements and ready for future disposition decisions
- 8,000 boxes of files identified for defensible destruction
Our methodology: Iron Mountain sustainable solutions
We recognize the important role we play in our customers’ value chain. We believe we have a responsibility to leverage our sustainable business practices to add value to
our product offerings.
Iron Mountain’s method for identifying solutions that can help customers measure and report on progress toward their sustainability goals was developed in partnership with MIT’s Sustainability Lab and received external endorsement from a panel of independent subject matter experts and business leaders. The framework focuses on four core criteria:
- The solution addresses a significant and clearly defined sustainability challenge.
- A comprehensive product lifecycle review of benefits and limitations results in a net positive impact rating.
- Sustainability claims are clear and based on a third-party endorsement.
- Transparency is provided on business processes and calculation methodologies.
Learn More About Smart Sort Any business process that involves sorting and organizing records can benefit from Smart Sort. To learn more or request information, contact your Iron Mountain Account Manager directly, go to our Smart Sort web page or fill out this form including the words “Smart Sort” in the comments section.