Dell Unveils Its Digital Forensics Solution

Today we're unveiling a new solution we feel is pretty special and embodies everything we wanted to achieve when we decided to restructure the way Public Sector customers' needs are addressed by Dell.  At the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) International Policing Exhibition and Summer Conference (ACPO-APA) we'll be announcing the Dell Digital Forensics Solution – a collaboration between customers and specialist partners to help solve one of the biggest challenges facing police and security forces today – managing digital evidence.

The amount of digital evidence that needs to be reviewed is growing at a huge rate, and this is putting forensic experts under pressure to analyse data quickly and accurately to help secure arrests and convictions.  It makes perfect sense that this is happening, when you consider how entwined in our lives digital devices are – why would criminals be any different? In the UK you have 28 days in which to get your case together before a suspect must be released, which isn't a lot of time to look through what might be terabytes of data in a single case.  The average backlog of data awaiting forensic analysis in the UK is 18-24 months across the 43 police constabularies, according to comments made by the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit at InfoSec.

Working with support from AccessData, EMC, Intel, Oracle, Symantec, VEGA and others, Dell has developed a new data centre approach to digital forensics that simplifies the entire process, improves the efficiency of sharing and administering data across analyst teams, and supports strict evidence handling guidelines.  This is very different to the way many systems work now, where data is analysed in isolation on a workstation with little protection from malicious code and no ability for analysts to collaborate on the same evidence. We've taken our experience in servers, the cloud and high performance computing, and created a solution which we believe will transform the way digital evidence is processed, leading to quicker forensic analysis and criminal convictions.

Our mission at Dell is to ensure that we combine our 25-year history of driving affordable, accessible IT with an intimate understanding of what different parts of the public sector need to deliver solutions that are green, simplified and secure.  By simplify we mean cut costs and conquer complexity, ultimately leading to customers reclaiming time, money and people. The Digital Forensics solution really embodies this, and through our partner network we've been able to bring best of breed and insight to the project, to produce something that really is greater than the sum of its parts.

About the Author: Josh Claman