The industry's largest provider, Iron Mountain, was founded in 1951 near Hudson, New York.1 Its latest annual report gives a sense of how ordinary the practice has become.
One provider, in its own filing
How the practice became a standard
- 1951Commercial records storage begins1
Iron Mountain founded near Hudson, New York.
- 2005Banking supervisors address outsourcing2
The Joint Forum publishes principles for outsourcing in financial services.
- 2016Records management is standardised3
ISO 15489-1:2016 sets out the concepts and principles of records management.
- 2021Operational resilience4
The Basel Committee publishes principles for operational resilience, including third-party dependencies.
The reasons have not changed
Institutions moved records out for three reasons: floor space in the places they work is expensive, retrieval from an unindexed room depends on people who eventually leave, and a single copy in a working building is exposed to everything that building is exposed to. None of those reasons is specific to any one country.
Sources
4 sources verified, last checked 4 October 2026- 1
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- 4