Enterprise Connect is key to Iron Mountain's real-time booking system

Global information security giant Iron Mountain provides record management, information destruction, and data backup services to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. You’ve probably seen their trucks drive past you on the streets.

As part of their growth strategy, the Iron Mountain sales teams are always keen to present their services to potential customers as well as continue to develop their relationships with existing clients. It’s important that Iron Mountain’s sales teams – like any other sales team – can set up regular meetings and conversations with their clients and prospects.

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The Challenge

Iron Mountain’s teams approached Cronofy because they wanted to build an internal booking system. That system would allow business development executives and telemarketing teams to book client meetings based on the real-time availability of sales representatives. Meetings needed to be created and pushed to the calendar of the relevant salesperson with all the necessary information.

Following an initial conversation with Iron Mountain’s development team to understand their requirements, we recommended including Appointedd in this project.

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The Solution

Appointedd is a leading online booking and scheduling software that enables any business to schedule across teams and timezones. Cronofy partners with Appointedd to provide online booking with integrated calendar capability for enterprise organisations.

The Appointedd user interface is sleek and easy-to-use, aligning it with Iron Mountain’s requirements. They also already use the Cronofy Calendar API to ensure that their users’ schedules are always up-to-date and to prevent any double-bookings.

For Iron Mountain, protecting their employees’ privacy and the data entrusted to them by their clients is paramount. One of the challenge of this project was ensuring that there will be no possible breach between the calendars of Iron Mountain’s sales teams and other part of the business. Choosing Cronofy made sense at every level thanks to our straightforward onboarding feature, Enterprise Connect.

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How it works

The booking process is done via the Appointedd booking system interface. Iron Mountain employees can now connect to it and use it to book meetings on behalf of sales representatives. In addition, Iron Mountain’s clients can book directly with sales representatives 24/7 offering the ultimate customer convenience and reducing the time spent scheduling by employees.

Appointedd’s unique timezone technology enables customers to book with Iron Mountain from anywhere in the world. Appointedd manages the impact of each booking through the business with MI reports, automated SMS and email communication and the ability to store client information.

Appointedd use the Cronofy API to surface the real-time availability of connected calendars and returns that data securely – through encryption – to their booking system. Cronofy’s data security processes comply with data protection needs and policies of a stock exchange listed business like Iron Mountain. This is crucial for a business whose activities are based on information security.

The Cronofy team worked hard to ensure that Iron Mountain was protected according to the standard any client would expect of such a business. This involved working closely with their data information security team, Exchange team, and active directory team. Cronofy’s Enterprise Connect ensures that the integration is fully secured.

Multinational organizations like Iron Mountain can onboard calendars in bulk with Enterprise Connect. There’s no need to ask users to connect their calendar individually, which isn’t practical for a large organization.

Enterprise Connect also provides greater control and security than when each calendar is connected individually. There’s only one entry point into an organization’s calendar service, meaning that there’s only one entry point to secure and monitor instead of hundreds or thousands.

The result has ensured that only Iron Mountain sales teams can connect a subset of calendars to the Appointedd booking system. There’s no risk of other employees of Iron Mountain sharing their availability information or event details. The sales team’s calendars are isolated from the rest of the organization, so no other calendars are exposed.

This architecture was designed by Iron Mountain and Cronofy’s development teams after completion of a STRIDE threat model. The STRIDE threat model was created by Microsoft. It is designed to assess potential threats such as data breaches and information security challenges by describing threats and planning responses in order to mitigate them.

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Going further

Part of the challenge with this project was Iron Mountain’s use of Exchange servers to host their employees’ calendars. Exchange is difficult to integrate with due to there being over 127 different versions, all of which have different functionalities.

To build foolproof calendar sync Iron Mountain was looking for a Calendar API that catered to all existing versions of Exchange. That’s why we built the Cronofy Calendar API – so that developers can create calendar integrations that work no matter the calendar service and no matter the version. We handle all the connections and maintenance issues.

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"The Cronofy API was key in allowing us to give Iron Mountain’s teams a real-time view of the sales teams’ calendars. The booking process is seamless and Cronofy’s support team is always on hand to answer our questions. We were able to deliver a solution leveraging our booking interface in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to develop it internally."

Claire MacKey | Head of Partnerships, Appointedd

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Get secure and real-time calendar sync for your business

If you want to build a custom booking system for your business, Cronofy can help, no matter what calendar service your users chose.

To see Cronofy in action, don’t hesitate to book your demo.