Data conversion services
Data transfer from tape and optical media
Data migration services
Maintaining data security & availability
Computer forensic services
Securing the digital evidence
Data Conversion Services
Tape Conversion and Optical Disk Conversion services can give you access to data from tapes and disks that you cannot read because you either do not have the correct drive, or else do not have the application to restore the files. Whereas with media such as CD-ROM and DVD there is a level of standardisation, for example the MAC, Windows and Linux will all access a CD that contains data written in compliance with the ISO9660 standard, the situation with backup tapes and some optical storage is not so benign. To restore the data from a backup tape you need not only to have a drive that can physically read data from the tape, but also the correct backup application. To further complicate matters, if the data on the tape is from a radically different system (e.g. AS/400) the opportunity to find an application that can understand the data is not readily available.
Altirium's tape and optical disk data conversion service gives you access to data from a wide range of storage media and data formats and dramatically reduces the time that would otherwise be required to identify the source of data, the applications that have been used and then to attempt to configure a system to restore the required data files.
Data Migration Service
Technology moves at a tremendous pace, and keeping up can be a tortuous process. A tape archive that has grown over several years might now be using tape media that is bordering on becoming obsolete and use an archival format that you no longer want to maintain. Sustaining the level of data availability that is required for data protection, or to comply with regulatory requirements, can lead to an already pressed IT department having to maintain legacy tape hardware, server infrastructure and obsolete tape software. Also, as an archive grows the physical space requirement and costs grow with it.
Altirium's data migration service gives data availability without the anguish of system maintenance. An entire, or partial, transfer of the contents of a tape archive can be made to newer and often vastly higher capacity media which reduces the space required, and lessens the risk that a tape might become unreadable because the hardware can no longer be maintained to read it. A tape migration process can also entail a change in the backup architecture so, for example, those DLT tapes containing NetWare ARCserve backups can be migrated to LTO4 with several times the capacity, and converted so that they can be read under Windows without the need to maintain a NetWare server.
Computer Forensics
Computer data forms the basis for the evidence in much criminal and civil litigation, but there has been a massive increase in the volume of data stored and so the sheer scale of the operation to locate evidence can be daunting, and there are often tight deadlines for the production of evidence that cannot be met without professional assistance.
A tape archive, for example, may contain an invaluable "snap-shot" of system activity that could be essential to support on-going litigation, for example email records going back over several years, yet the effort to create systems to which the data can be restored and then to process the tapes can be prohibitive. Altirium's computer forensic service specialises in the processing of tape archives for legal purposes, or to support compliance and governance requirements, and can process large volumes of tape media quickly to meet the most rigid deadlines.
