Case Studies

Kroll Ontrack has expertise in many aspects of data management. ina ddition to our established service delivery procedures, when required, the delivery of each service is tailored to the client’s individual needs to ensure the best possible & most accurate result, whether it is a hard drive recovery, internal subsidiary investigation or computer forensic investigation.

Case Studies

Computer Aid relies on Kroll Ontrack to guarantee trust in refurbished PCs

Every month leading UK refurbishment charity Computer Aid International processes 3,000 PCs and laptops donated by businesses and individuals – preparing them for use in schools and projects all over the world. Computer Aid relies on Ontrack® Eraser software from Kroll Ontrack to ensure that every PC has its data wiped and removed before it is shipped out to countries across Africa and South America.

Accius Systems Cloud Recovery

One of Kroll Ontrack's first cloud recoveries was for Accius Systems Corporation, a developer of custom energy and trading software for global corporations. Accius was using Amazon® Elastic Compute Cloud™ (Amazon® EC2™) to host a development and testing environment for a new energy business application and data mart.

Barclays Wealth

Barclays Wealth offers a bespoke wealth management service for client assets worth over £133bn worldwide.

Barclays Wealth is using Ontrack PowerControls to restore and consolidate emails from a variety of various email platforms. Jason Summan, head of Unified Communications has to manage restoring communications from Exchange 2003 and the more archaic Exchange 5.5. Jason has used PowerControls for over seven years and deals with over 15 requests for restores a month.

“Power Controls provides a simple and straightforward way in which to retrieve Exchange mailbox data with minimum fuss. Previously corrupted databases or complex restores could mean a day’s job for an administrator. The ability to restore quickly and efficiently enables the IT team to rapidly respond to demands, but also frees up time for more proactive tasks.”

Red-Hot Laptop

The laptop itself, as shown in the photograph (yes I know it doesn’t look much like a laptop any more), was sent in, and is a true testament to the workings of the Kroll Ontrack Clean Room.

It is no exaggeration to say that every clean room engineer had some input into the recovery of this drive.

Often, complex jobs such as this are a collaborative effort between several engineers (as with many regular jobs). It is never a simple case of following normal recovery procedures. With these recoveries, it is commonplace for ideas to be shared, and different scenarios to be talked through. As you can see from the picture, the drive - and laptop - had suffered severe fire damage, in addition to being dowsed by water afterwards.

Following hours of painstaking cleaning, and other high-tech recovery procedures, our engineers got the drive working again. Furthermore, an astounding 99% of the lost data was recovered.

Disc-o Inferno!

We see a lot of weird and wonderful things coming through our doors, but none give an engineer more satisfaction than recovering the unrecoverable. Our engineers never turn their back on a challenge, and took on a CD recovery with spectacular results.

As can be seen from the picture, the CD in question was severely damaged; probably after being dropped in a toaster or accidentally falling in a George Foreman grill! Regardless of the reason, our engineers grabbed the bull by the horns and took the job on.

After much cleaning and spinning on the decks, our clever cloggs managed to recover 47% of the data area....nice one!

Groundbreaking Shuffle Recovery

It is true that here at Kroll Ontrack we’ve seen almost every possible recovery going. So when something new comes along, especially when it involves soldering and microchips, there will be one engineer who will race us all to pick up the challenge....

Most people would wonder why a customer thinks that their music is so valuable that it warrants the diagnosis fee alone, let alone paying for a full recovery. However, it is not our place to ask why, we simply get on with the job in hand. With this in mind, the engineer picked up this job and in so doing, performed the first iPod Shuffle recovery in the history of Kroll Ontrack.

Now, we obviously can’t go in to great depth as to how this pioneering recovery was performed, but we can tell you that it involved the customer’s chips, a set of parts, and plenty of experimentation.

This recovery was much more complicated than normal for two main reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, this kind of recovery had never been performed before so there were no points of reference. Secondly, the small size of the device made any soldering etc, all the more difficult.

Despite these problems, Kroll Ontrack managed to recover 100% of the customer’s data!

Clearly this recovery has further reaching implications; it opens the doors to Kroll Ontrack’s ability to recover data from other manufacturer’s MP3 players and other digital hardware of similar construction.