There are fewer and fewer crimes that do not leave a digital trail, and so there is an increasing load of digital evidence to track through for law enforcement agencies be it from PCs, mobile phones or game consoles.
Josh Claman, vice president of public sector, EMEA at Dell, said: “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 forensics analysis and criminal convictions.”
Currently, once data on a seized device is cloned, it is ingested onto one or more workstations before being indexed, triaged and analysed – a process that could take weeks. Although data can be shared, it is rare that multiple analysts or users can access for example an image simultaneously, and working from a remote location or sharing of information between organisations and across borders, is next to impossible.
Dell says its Digital Forensics Solution overcomes many of these problems as the process of gathering, uploading and analysing the information can be done in a datacentre on high performance servers as opposed to on individual workstations. Multiple devices can be ingested simultaneously and prepared for analysis, and multiple analysts can access the information at the same time – and remotely if need be.
According to Dell, its datacentre-based digital forensics solution also helps safeguard against evidence contamination at the same time as preserving an audit trail of evidence handling. Dell calls it the “digital chain of custody”, which it says could stop a conviction from falling to pieces on technicalities.
Dell worked together with AccessData, EMC, Intel, Oracle, Symantec, VEGA and others on its Digital Forensics Solution.