R&d Companies And Data Loss

By Author: James Walsh
Total Articles: 68
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This game can be won only by nimble-footed businesses which have an ear to the ground and can sense in which direction the market is moving.

Every few years, the basic paradigm - the way of doing business - changes in an industry. Only those companies emerge unscathed which can predict this change and turn themselves on a dime to suit the tectonic shifts taking place in the market.

Launching a new product efficiently and with newer features is the trick to winning the marketing battle. Japanese have the fantastic philosophy of Kaizen, which means constant improvement in anything. The better the product you launch, the more it will be a success. But what makes a product better? It is research and development (R&D).

Companies which are serious about excelling in the market place and outsmarting the competition have dedicated R&D teams staffed by engineers and creative designers who do constant innovation in their products. They brainstorm, read customer feed-back, study the products of other competing companies and use their intuition to come up with new ideas that can increase the value and decrease ...
... the cost of their products for the customers.

Today, most R&D takes place in a digital environment. The days of engineers working on drawing boards with pencils and stencils are long past. Instead, what you see in R&D labs are high-end computers running specialised software. In front of them sits trained technical staff, totally focussed on the screens where new products or new features of existing products are being created.

Due to the fact that most R&D work is done on powerful workstations, the threat of data loss is always there. The intellectual property that exists inside R&D computers is very important. It may be worth a king's ransom for companies. Such data is the result of hundreds or even thousands of man-hours spent in research. There is a lot of money riding on it. Loss of R&D data would result not only in an immediate and massive monetary set-back but it will also hit a company in terms of delayed product launches while the competition forges ahead.

R&D work is critical for most companies, but more so for those in industries such as pharmaceuticals, engineering, consumer products, defence, aerospace, aeronautics, nano-technology, bio-technology and so on. These areas are totally driven by R&D and there is a perpetual race among companies to file new patents before others can do so, since most of them are working on same technologies.

The data of R&D companies can get lost due to hardware or software reasons. The read / write head of hard drives may become loose and lie lifeless on the data-recording surface of the platters, scratching them all the way as the latter get spun wildly by the spindle motor. This kind of hard drive crash is very dangerous because once the data-recording surface suffers physical damage, it is extremely difficult - if not impossible - to recover data. There are other causes too for a hard drive to become dysfunctional. These particularly involve failure of components such as the spindle motor, circuit board, power supply and controller card.

Apart from hardware causes, data can also be lost due to software errors, most of which are user-inflicted. The hard drive may be reformatted mistakenly, a crucial file may get deleted or there may be some kind of corruption in the data that does not allow the file to be opened by the user. Then there are disasters, both man-made and natural, that may come visiting upon the company premises. These may include earthquakes, fire (both natural and arson), terrorist strike, floods, cyclones and lightning strike that can destroy the entire building as well as the computers stored inside it.

When R&D data gets lost due to any reason, there is understandably a lot of panic. Since the data is very valuable, one should not try to recover it oneself by tampering with the hard disk or using a DIY software. If done improperly, this may worsen the problem instead of addressing it. What actually should be done involves calling a data-recovery company and getting the data extracted professionally.

These companies have a technically qualified and experienced staff that is specially trained to tackle a variety of data-recovery problems. Good data-recovery companies also have a clean room where the inner components of a hard disk can be safely exposed to the atmosphere to diagnose the problem and extract the client's data.

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. For more information on computer crime and Computer Forensics see http://www.fieldsassociates.co.uk