Kroll Ontrack predicts top data recovery challenges for 2014

LONDON, UK: Kroll Ontrack, the data recovery, information management and electronic discovery products and services provider offered insight into the trends that will become the biggest data challenges for 2014.

The company predicts that the rise in erase verifications for SSDs and mobile phone adoption at work, coupled with the widespread use of HDD drives and online cloud services will increase the volume of data recovery requests next year.

Paul Le Messurier, data recovery operations manager at Kroll Ontrack UK said: "As storage drives continue to grow in size and intricacy so does the risk associated with storing data. We predict that SSD and HDD drives will increase in popularity in 2014, but the complexity of how they store data will also compromise people's ability to erase data or recover it when things go wrong."

The popularity of BYOD and CYOD programmes among businesses will increase the use of virtualised environments to support them and also lead to more data recovery requests.

There's no universal standard for wiping out data on the disks, and the only way to verify the method of erasure for each SSD type is for expert engineers to perform recovery tests individually on each SSD disk platter to ensure data is completely erased.

The demand for erase verification will continue in 2014 as SSDs continue to expire and companies become more cautious about data leaks through the re-use of SSDs.

The growing pressures on corporate and cloud data centres to improve storage efficiencies and reduce costs will continue in 2014 and will encourage disk makers to design more complex storage disks to accommodate these challenges - such as the first HDD with helium called Ultrastar He6 from HGST.

The pioneering hard drive is the world's highest capacity HDD, and uses helium to reduce space within the disk platters- thereby boosting data capacity for the disks. Kroll Ontrack predicts the new HDD will gain traction in the market and new challenges to data recovery will also be introduced in 2014 as people will not have the equipment or expertise to deal with data loss problems when they arise.

The amount of data being generated by companies and individuals is growing rapidly and the answer to storage remains the cloud. This will present challenges for data recovery since administrators don't always know where the cloud is based and how to access user data. Also, most of the data will be encrypted for security reasons and will therefore require expert engineers to recover data if a disaster strikes.

This will be due in part to the complexity of virtualisation and the lack of expertise among administrators to deal with user errors, such as deleting virtual drives by mistake.

"Businesses should ensure they have an adequate back up plan in place in 2014 to cope with the inevitable problems that will impact data security. Establishing a relationship with a data recovery expert should also be a priority for administrators that lack the knowledge and expertise to support the challenges of new innovations," said Le Messurier.