NEWS

Companies and individuals often do not  consider the implications of data recovery until  it is too late – when data, pictures and files have been lost due to physical damage or corruption of files. Like insurance, data recovery, and knowing who to call, should be thought of ahead of incidents, as opposed to after the fact.

Founded- and still based in Kongsvinger – Ibas is one of the world’s most prominent experts on data recovery, data erasure and digital forensics. Moreover, after the merger with US Company KrolLDiscovery, they are increasingly equipped to offer their global services with a local approach.

Based in 43 locations over 19 countries, Ibas assists both companies and private customers recovering lost, deleted or damaged data. Although originally started as a data recovery company, as a result of in-house technological development, Ibas is now also a market leader in data erasure and forensics.

“When data is lost, either through physical damage, software malfunction or human error, most of our customers only want the data back and never ask how it is done. Gradually, as we had increasingly more customers using the data in the court systems, we developed technology to prove where previously lost files were retrieved from,” Bjørn Krok, Computer Forensics Team Leader at Ibas says.

“When assisting with trials or in the investigative process, there might be data that goes back several decades, it is therefore essential that we have the ability to recover all data, process it and subsequently generate a timeline of all relevant data to the investigation.”

“As it could involve enormous amounts of data, it can take our customers months to go through, but with our tools, we can find all the relevant documents in few days.”

“Additionally, we remove irrelevant files, duplicates, and make everything accessible so that the customer can filter through the data from their criteria; chronologically by date or search key words and so on.”

“Basically, our job is to reconstruct all the data and make the process of going through large amounts of previously unstructured information achievable in as short a time as possible,” Krok says.

Global Reach

The merger with Kroll Ontrack in 2006 and later LDiscovery in 2016, enabled Ibas to expand their services and expertise worldwide, a strength that has been proven useful in several ways.

“We have experienced great advantages by having local affiliation, while being global. I was working on one assignment, to secure technical evidence for a big case, which involved gathering data as evidence from practically every continent, due to our current size; we were able to draw on our resources in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East to gather all the evidence needed,” Krok says.

Although recovery of data has been the backbone of Ibas since its origin, what is becoming increasingly vital with the emergence of new privacy laws is deleting of data.

“Data recovery is something you hope you never need, but it is good to know we exist when it does. Deletion of data however, happens continuously and needs to be executed in the correct manner in terms of policy and data protection laws, to avoid spreading of sensitive data.”

“As customers are increasingly concerned with data protection laws and handling of information, particularly across borders, the fact that we are based in 19 countries will ensure that the handling of data corresponds to laws of each respective country,” Krok says.

Ibas offers free consultation and advice and have been AmCham members since 2013.