"Data loss threatened by deceptive security in modern IT systems"

"Modern IT systems often lull companies into a deceptive sense of security, leading to the neglect of absolutely essential backups," warns Nicolas Ehrschwendner, Managing Director of the Austrian data recovery company Attingo. In the first ten months of 2014 alone, the data recovery specialist recorded more than 400 failures in IT systems with supposedly well-secured hard drive connections – so-called RAID systems. 80 percent of businesses and organizations today use such RAID hard drive configurations, which are considered reliable and secure due to their integrated redundancy. However, appearances can be deceiving, as the statistics show. Even RAID systems can fail partially or completely without warning due to the combination of unfavorable factors. If no additional data backup has been made, the only option left is to turn to a data recovery specialist.

High Priority: Data Recovery "24/7"

"We restore data from failed systems within a few hours," reports Ehrschwendner from daily practice. "Like rescue services and fire brigades, we are available around the clock and work even at night. This way, employees of affected companies often don't notice a system failure at all. When they arrive at work in the morning, everything is already functioning again," describes Ehrschwendner the high-priority missions of his engineers. This kind of readiness is only possible because Attingo maintains a spare parts warehouse with more than 10,000 hard drives and always has the necessary materials on hand.

Data Disaster in a Hospital

The ISO 9001-certified company restores lost data in its in-house cleanroom laboratories in Vienna, meeting the highest security standards. Sending data carriers to foreign laboratories – as many providers do – is not appropriate for highly sensitive data. Attingo specializes in recovering critical data and can reconstruct information even in the most difficult cases, where others have already given up. A data disaster involving a hospital database was resolved within a few hours, a defective RAID system of a health insurance company was fully restored, and a server failure of a TOP 10 ATX company was fixed overnight. Some data recovery jobs are quite extraordinary: data carriers from passengers of a crashed airplane, destroyed cameras of a film crew after a bomb attack, or laptop data from criminals – Attingo has experienced quite a lot over the past 18 years and regularly works for experts and courts. Among them are data carriers from all over Europe, North Africa, and the Arab world.

4,000 Data Loss Incidents Annually

"Through our own research and development, we have specialized tools, electronics, and software that allow us to reconstruct data in more than 95 percent of all cases almost completely," emphasizes Nicolas Ehrschwendner. In addition to Austria, Attingo also operates locations in Germany and the Netherlands. Attingo Data Recovery now handles more than 4,000 data loss cases per year, with over 10 percent being RAID cases.