John Lewis, IS director at Geokinetics, didn't let the geophysical services company's rapid growth shake him up.

In recent years, the Houston company grew quickly through acquisition - then faced the challenge of merging five independent entities into a single public company. That had IT building a Sarbanes-Oxley-compliant infrastructure in the space of 12 months, Lewis says.

Lewis first had to figure out how to control the data-archiving infrastructure. Electronic discovery was the next requirement, especially as Rules 16 and 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure had been amended to provide a framework for preserving electronically stored documents and conducting e-discovery. Lewis, an attorney by training, says he didn't want to get caught out of compliance and have to explain it.

Enter Iron Mountain, and its LiveVault, Connected Backup/PC and Total Email Management Suite. Geokinetics has been using the online data-backup services since September 2007.

"We wanted to move the company from an independently managed infrastructure to a shared infrastructure for IT," Lewis says. "Centralizing on a single backup platform and e-mail management system achieved that goal. We were able to very quickly apply a working solution to each of the sites, which in our case span six continents."

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