A global consulting company, Hitachi Consulting is a recognized leader in delivering proven business and IT solutions to Global 2000 companies across many industries. After 20 years as the consulting arm of Grant Thornton, Hitachi Consulting was incorporated in November 2000 when Grant Thornton sold its consulting organization to Hitachi, Ltd.

As a long-time, satisfied Iron Mountain customer, Michael Shisko, Hitachi Consulting's Director of IT, was adamant that Hitachi use the service following the company's buy-out of Grant Thornton's consulting organization. Already impressed with the way PC data protection quickly solved the problem of insufficient storage for Grant Thornton, Shisko realized that the benefits of Iron Mountain’s service went beyond just data protection.

Yet in 2004, Hitachi opted to cancel Iron Mountain's services after receiving backup and recovery utilities at no extra cost with the purchase of new laptops. The new software claimed to make local backups and PC-to-server backups on scheduled intervals, protecting all data from loss, but Shisko immediately recognized the product's inferiority. Inefficient and time-consuming, the free replacement software backed up files to the server as a simple, rather than intelligent, file transfer, without any of the data reduction benefits that Iron Mountain's software provides. Upon its return to Iron Mountain, Hitachi made the decision to select the Licensed Software option, which allows the company to back up data to its own servers.