Iron Mountain Adds Capabilities to Policy Center Platform

Iron Mountain Incorporated IRM recently announced that it has added new capabilities to its online policy management platform — Policy Center — that will enable companies to understand and comply with policies relating to privacy and retention of data.

Notably, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is scheduled to be effective from May 25, 2018, is a legal framework that consolidates data-privacy laws across Europe, and will be applicable to companies within and outside the country that control data of European Union (EU) subjects.

As a result, enterprises will need to be well informed about legal retention and data-processing obligations to ensure complete adherence, as well as avoid any data breach possibilities. Further, to achieve compliance, the firms require a clear governance program that provides accurate information. By incorporating data-privacy information into the Policy Center platform, Iron Mountain fulfills compliance needs of companies. 

Amid this increasing rigid regulation, such a cloud-based retention and privacy policy management platform will help enterprises to comprehensively understand the obligations and adhere to regulations such as the EU GDPR. In addition, Policy Center Enterprise Edition offers various tools to document important information relating to personal data. 

In fact, the cloud-based solution is now equipped with updated privacy and retention guidelines from all over the world, backed by privacy experts from individual industries and locations. This will provide better clarity to companies that can update the respective data privacy and retention practices through a browser interface. Additionally, these companies can notify employees of the rules to ensure uniform implementation.

Though the latest capability addition will improve the services offered by the company’s cloud-based policy management platform amid a challenging regulatory landscape, it is struggling to maintain revenues from storage services. Notably, service revenues remain modest due to the shrinking activity rates as stored records are becoming less active. Furthermore, numerous acquisitions have resulted in a highly-leveraged balance sheet.

Amid these, shares of this Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) company have underperformed its industry in the past three months. While shares of the company lost 8.8%, the industry incurred a loss of 5.9%, during the same time period.

 

Stocks Worth a Look

A few better-ranked stocks from the same space include Arbor Realty Trust ABR, Extra Space Storage EXR and Sotherly Hotels SOHO. All three stocks carry a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Arbor Realty Trust’s Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2018 funds from operations (FFO) per share remained unchanged at 90 cents over the past month. Its shares returned 1.2% in three months’ time.

Extra Space Storage’s FFO per share estimates for the current year moved up 3% to $4.59 in a month’s time. Its shares gained 4.5% over the past three months.

Sotherly Hotels’ FFO per share estimates for 2018 was revised upward marginally to $1.05 over the past month. The stock gained 7.8% during the past three months.

Note: Anything related to earnings presented in this write-up represents funds from operations (FFO) — a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs.

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Iron Mountain Incorporated (IRM) : Free Stock Analysis Report
 
Arbor Realty Trust (ABR) : Free Stock Analysis Report
 
Sotherly Hotels Inc. (SOHO) : Free Stock Analysis Report
 
Extra Space Storage Inc (EXR) : Free Stock Analysis Report
 
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