Data recovery services provider, Kroll Ontrack, has opened a new data recovery cleanroom facility in Queensland.
The company established its original cleanroom on the West End site in 2005, but increased demand for data recovery services has allowed Kroll Ontrack to expand and add to existing services, including the data recovery techniques from storage media such as hard drives and solid state devices.
“We have rebuilt what we had, so half the staff went to the Brisbane CBD office. Four engineers now work out the new cleanroom and we also have labs in Hong Kong and Singpore,” Kroll Ontrack general manager for Asia Pacific, Adrian Briscoe, said.
The business has undergone a rapid expansion of staff in the face of increased demand for data recovery services. Kroll Ontrack is also the Apple service provider data recovery portal. And the company has successfully undertaken its first cloud computing recovery recently, where a storage area network (SAN) running cloud applications had collapsed.
Briscoe said the majority organisations people which lose important data are small and medium businesses, as well as individuals such as home users and students. About 76 per cent of Kroll Ontrack’s work comes through mechanical device failure and a combination of older infrastructure that is reaching its capacity limit and the rise of virtualisation has also led to the increase in demand for data recovery.
“IT works 99.9 per cent of the time, but we are seeing an uptick in user error over the past few months as people have been more conservative with new acquisistions,” he said.
“[Data recovery] is a very ad hoc service. It’s a little bit seasonal — when the heat goes up, more jobs come in. Especially over the Christmas holiday period when people are away, the air conditioning is off, but the devices are left on. Tax year end is also a busy period.
“We have fairly large names who come to us who should know better; somebody has deleted the wrong VM (virtual machine), formatted a LUN (logical unit number) or tried to move too much data at once. As storage becomes more mature, people are less involved with the 1s and 0s. It’s all about GUIs (graphical user interfaces), not the command line.”
Briscoe said the coming year would see more data loss impact on systems, and an increase in virtual machine (VM) related issues.