A new digital archiving company, iForem, launched at DEMOfall07 this week with a product that lets businesses store critical data without a continuing cost.

IForem announced the iForem Active Records Management service, which provides a pay-once digital vault for businesses interested in storing, protecting and sharing their intellectual property.

The company uses a service called iNuity which places customers’ data in an irrevocable trust account. IForem places a calculated amount of funds from each sale into the iNuity trust. The trust invests the funds and ensures that even if iForem is bankrupt, or purchased, your data will still be available.

IForem says that businesses are overwhelmed by the number of physical and digital documents they have. It says that businesses can rely on many storage platforms for storing their data but can’t ensure the long-term retention of business-critical data.

IForem offers four products – a vault, where files are stored; a deep freeze, where the user’s vault can remain forever; an access manager, which determines what files a user can access or contribute to the vault; and, a version automator.

Users access the vault via a Web browser and can e-mail files to the vault. The Deep Freeze protects the file from deletion, even by the user. Deep freezing a file makes it a permanent member of the vault. The access manager controls what files users can see in the vault, who can add content and how users access data. Files and folders can be assigned access rights for read only or write access. The Version Automator ensures that files are accessible from within the vault – files are scanned to determine that the most current version of the software was used. For files that a user chooses, a duplicate is created and converted to the latest version, while the original is stored to ensure no data loss occurs from the update.

IForem also contains records management capability in which records can be archived and identified, scanned, access and preserved. IT administrators can set records retention policies.

IForem Active Records Management starts at $20 for 20MB of vault space for a life-time storage fee. It is scalable up to 1GB for $1,024.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.