Life at Kroll Ontrack

I have been working at Kroll Ontrack since early 2002. Part of the fun of working at a company that’s been around as long as Kroll Ontrack are the stories and statistics. I have seen this company go to great lengths on behalf of our legal technologies and data recovery customers. For example, did you know that one winter was so bad that we had to call our neighborhood airport for jet fuel to power our data center through an extreme Minnesota blizzard? I honestly never imagined having a “good neighbor story” that swapped the normal cup of sugar with gallons of hydrocarbon, but there you go. Likewise, there are stories every day of memories saved or business-critical data recovered by our amazing Ontrack Data Recovery team, such as restoring data after Hurricane Sandy.

Here are some of my favorite “things you did not know” about Kroll Ontrack:

• There is more to life than just PDFs and MS Word files. Kroll Ontrack processed 7,000 different file types in the last two years alone. For many, this should emphasize that native file production format issues are real. For others, this is cold hard proof that there are actually other types of file types in existence besides the frequently used and technically questionable catch-all formats: ‘words,’ ‘sounds,’ and ‘videos.’

• We can ship boxes of paper by the truckload – but fortunately no one asks anymore! Kroll Ontrack can process 49 million pages of load files in a single day. My favorite story fro back in the day was a US government agency that insisted that we send their production delivery as paper. “But it’s over a million pages,” we tried to warn them, “that will be several hundred boxes.” They insisted and so we started printing—when the first semi-truck load showed up and they had no room for even the first delivery, they cried ‘uncle’ and worked with us to determine an effective electronic delivery solution.

• We have friends across the world. Kroll Ontrack collected data from over 126 countries last year. We also provide critical data recovery services around the world, which means not only can we help when weather strikes in the U.S. but also internationally. Kroll Ontrack’s legal technologies services have been supporting EU clients for approximately 20 years. In fact, just last year the UK branch processed a whopping 50 Terabytes of client data. In addition to the EU, Kroll Ontrack is quickly ramping up in Asia, processing and hosting more multilingual data than any other provider.  In fact, 98% of our projects contain some amount of multilingual data!

• We are part of the solution for taming the beast of electronic data. It can feel like just some made up statistic when you hear that the amount of electronic data being generated and consumed in the world far exceeds a zettabyte. But it can be an expensive and painful truth when you are faced with litigation. Kroll Ontrack filtered over 2 billion documents in the past year and can filter over 30 million documents per day. How’s that for Big Data?

If you enjoyed these fun-facts, check out the complete infographic: “10 Things You Didn’t Know about Kroll Ontrack”.