I was reading recently a posting by Cole Shiflett on his blog http://coleshiflett.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/business-certifications-and-it-professionals/
And it brought into focus an issue that I have tried to raise with my data recovery peers in the past, the subject of certification. There are three reasons to have certification:
- Stop the delusion of our industry by untrained unprofessional competition.
- Prevent or at least significantly reduce the chance of data loss due to unsuspecting customers taking their precious data to be recovered by individual or business not qualified to do the work. The reason why this is so important is that the media may be damaged beyond recovery, while the unqualified attempting to perform delicate and highly specialized procedures they are not equipped and trained to do.
- Have a clearer picture of each provider certification and specialty, incase the recovery needs a very specific expertise.
Clearly most qualified lab can do the “common-run-of-the meal” recoveries, but then in addition they also develop specialties and expertise in a sub segment of our profession. Like for example PDA’s, Optical SCSI drives, drive with severe media damage, etc. If this was published information about a lab, it would help all of us who every once in a while come across one of those “unusual cases” and the customer is willing to pay what-it-takes to recover it. So that we can refer the customer instead of just dismissing it as no-recovery.