Exterro Inc. announces they have teamed up with Microsoft to deliver a cloud-based digital forensics platform for law enforcement agencies worldwide. Designed to counter rising data volumes, data complexity and resource constraints, the combination of Exterro’s Forensic Toolkit (FTK®) Lab on Microsoft Azure delivers exponentially improved forensic readiness, collaboration, and processing of data at scale designed to provide faster time to justice. The solution has already been chosen by one of the UK’s largest regional police forces.
Without digital forensics, most criminal cases today would struggle to succeed by relying solely on physical evidence like fingerprints or DNA. Evaluation of digital evidence – in crimes that range from counterterrorism to human trafficking to murder, drugs and firearms offenses – continues to grow, stretching police resources more than ever. With more digital devices and data sets to be examined than there are police resources to immediately deal with them, backlogs are increasing, and some cases can be delayed for months.
“Police forces face mounting challenges arising from explosive growth in evidence data and the increasing sophistication of security threats,” said Bobby Balachandran, CEO of Exterro. “Inefficiencies like the inability to integrate all data sources in an investigation, technology that doesn’t scale, and slower processing rates, all contribute to higher manpower costs and data backlogs that delay the criminal justice process. The combination of FTK Lab and Microsoft Azure solves these challenges and will significantly reduce forensic investigation backlog within law enforcement agencies.”
“After rigorous evaluation against these challenges, a large police agency in the UK chose the Exterro solution on Microsoft Azure based on the unprecedented speed and efficiencies they were able to achieve in their investigations,” said Balachandran. “The platform is fully integrated within the force’s workflows and can be accessed by any device used by law enforcement.”
FTK Lab provides unique depth of automation, orchestration, ease of use, data diversity and support for complex environments. It allows multiple evidence sets to be loaded and processed into single or multiple cases at the same time, with or without human intervention. This includes data from computers, mobiles, other PDAs, cloud data or loose files. It also encourages the enhancement of forensic ecosystems by allowing customers to import data from competitive solutions in the form of report ingestions, load file ingestions or directly via the restful API. By using Azure services and on demand auto-scaling, FTK Lab’s distributed processing technology is able to achieve maximum output with a direct, positive impact on speed and cost. This results in a significant reduction in evidence backlogs and far faster processing of data in the future.
Exterro’s FTK product portfolio hosted on Azure reduces the steps, complexities, and costs from intervention to prosecution of digital crimes. With the Exterro FTK Lab solution on Azure, this previously cumbersome process is streamlined, integrated, and automated within existing workflows, and efficiency is improved via consistent and repeatable forensically sound processes.
“FTK Lab on Microsoft Azure provides law enforcement agencies with a fundamental shift in approach, offering faster data turnaround times to help them accelerate their investigative processes,” said Kirk Arthur, senior director, business development, Worldwide Public Safety & Justice at Microsoft. “Together, FTK Lab and Azure give investigators the ability to ingest, review, and analyze very large volumes of data that will help to bring criminals to justice faster.”
The Exterro solution on Azure is architected to compensate for existing data backlogs. and consistent and repeatable steps for processing data enable ongoing efficiencies. Ease of use empowers front line officers to analyze their own cases. Costs are lowered by reducing the overall steps, travel time and man-hours required from intervention to prosecution. Automated validation within the solution provides confidence to officers in the results of the data processing.
The Azure platform is a cloud computing service created for building and managing services through Microsoft-managed data centers. Used by customers around the world, it proactively ensures security, privacy, and regulatory compliance with safeguards to protect the most sensitive workloads and data. Exterro is a globally renowned provider of Legal GRC software whose FTK solution is used worldwide by more than 130,000 clients in law enforcement, government agencies, corporations, service providers and law firms for their unique collection-to-analysis needs.
