https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/01/inside-iron-mountain.html

BUTLER COUNTY – Deep underground, beneath the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, sit racks of computer equipment that store a treasure trove of information from government records to corporate documents to master recordings of legendary artists.

Resting in a former limestone mine, it’s one of the nation’s most secure data centers and storage facilities. Few people inside Pennsylvania and outside it know this place exists. That’s the way the owner, Iron Mountain, likes it.

Despite the secrecy surrounding the facility, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, a federal student loan servicer and state grant administrator, discovered it and found it to be an ideal location to house its data center

So it is there, tucked deep inside a 1,200-acre mine where sensitive information is kept about millions of student loan borrowers and state grant recipients that PHEAA serves.

Finding a new home and moving the technology that stores more than 12 million student loan account holders' information is not a pick-up-and-go process.

It was years in the making. PHEAA’s data center had been housed in the same location in a building next to its Harrisburg headquarters since 1986. At that time, the facility probably was considered state of the art, said Michael Hendler, its vice president of infrastructure and operations.“But obviously technology changes very quickly and it really became pretty aged,” he said. “So we clearly needed to move.”

Once the decision was made to move, Hendler said the agency considered building its own data center but that proved to be far too costly. So they looked into migrating to leased space in a facility that is a pre-built data center space that houses multiple customers. Once the decision was made to go the leasing route, they had to find a place that the high level of security that the federal government requires of its student loan servicers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Higher_Education_Assistance_Agency

https://www.pheaa.org/about/board-members/

https://www.pheaa.org/about/executive-team/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_(company)

LET'S GO - FOR MORE RESEARCH!!! - WWG1WGA

(have to go to sleep soon, my last research was too long)