2021 became a truly transformational year in the history of Atola Technology. Years come and go, what stays are our accomplishments, lessons learned, people met and ideas shared. This year we achieved success, welcomed obstacles and embraced challenges: global chip shortage, new hardware and features, easing of travel restrictions, new business processes, etc. All this will have shaped our development as a team and a business.
So in the waning hours of 2021, let’s have a look and reflect on what we have experienced.
DiskSense 2
The most exciting event of 2021 was the launch of DiskSense 2 hardware unit for Atola Insight Forensic in July. We saw an opportunity to enhance the tool with parallel imaging capabilities, and our engineers equipped the new system with a server-grade motherboard and CPU as well as with an ECC RAM equivalent to that of TaskForce. Now Insight effortlessly images 3 drives (good or bad) in parallel and does multiple tasks in addition: hashing, wiping, file recovery and many more.
We are proud of this accomplishment. In times of the global chip shortage and overall uncertainty, this daring endeavor resulted in a great enhancement to a tried and true product that gives an immense productivity boost!
TaskForce releases
This year, the most exciting new functionality for TaskForce included RAID 10 and XFS support, Browse files, Multi-launch, AFF4 support and other features.
RAID configuration autodetection has generally been a very in-demand feature, which we will continue to develop in the upcoming releases.
Insight releases
Not only did Insight become a 64-bit application that supports both generations of hardware, it also was upgraded with these features: support of AFF4 files, Locate Sectors, XFS support, extended diagnostics for NVMe drives, Case management system improvements, etc. You can find the full list of new features here.
Assembly of hardware units
At the beginning of the year, Atola joined the rest of the world in experiencing the global chip shortage. It took our hardware department a few weeks to secure the required amount of spare parts for this year’s assembly and taught us a good lesson: our logistics is now suited to back up enough chips for the 2022 assembly and further batches.
On top of that, Atola opened a new warehouse in Canada and hired another hardware engineer for the assembly line. This has further secured smooth operations for thorough testing and timely assembly of hardware units.
New teammates
Atola team hired 8 more people this year, which is the most we have ever hired: Olena, Nikolay and Oleg joined the hardware team in March. Simultaneously, Anna and Andrew reinforced our QA team. Alexandra came in July to assist with the hardware assembly in Canada.
Katia joined us in the role of HR manager toward the end of the year, and she is now already looking for more talents to make the team bigger and stronger yet. In fact, Katia has already recruited another software engineer, Denis, whose first day with Atola is coming on January 10, and we can’t wait to welcome him on board!
Our hiring process is one of our team’s favorite and most impactful activities. More vacancies are open and we expect significant growth of the team in 2022.
Conferences
2021 did not bring the expected number of offline events back but we got to attend 3 forensic conferences and are planning to attend at least a dozen in 2022.
We heard throughout the year how much the market relies on offline meetings, and we certainly look forward to participating in all significant digital forensic events in the forthcoming years.
Apart from that, we have been visiting labs, holding training sessions, exchanging knowledge and ideas with our customers both offline and online. This activity will remain our priority to maintain an intensive communication flow with our partners and friends.
Team life
With all due precautions, the whole team is now committed to working at the office, as we find it more productive for our internal communications. And we are happy that 2021 made it possible again to meet in a more informal setting, too.
Meet you in 2022!
If 2021 was a year of transformation, then 2022 promises to bring us new exciting challenges and, hopefully, even more exciting accomplishments. We wish you a happy and healthy 2022!
Let’s make it a great one!
Yulia believes that with a product that is exceptionally good at solving tasks of forensic experts, marketing is about explaining its capabilities to the users. Yulia regularly represents Atola at DFIR events, holds free workshops and webinars about Atola imagers functionality and advocates on the users' behalf to ensure that Atola keeps on adding value and raising the bar for the industry.
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Yulia Samoteykina
Director of Marketing Yulia believes that with a product that is exceptionally good at solving tasks of forensic experts, marketing is about explaining its capabilities to the users. Yulia regularly represents Atola at DFIR events, holds free workshops and webinars about Atola imagers functionality and advocates on the users' behalf to ensure that Atola keeps on adding value and raising the bar for the industry.
