Digital Forensics Solutions

Digital forensics is an area of fast data growth for law enforcement organizations that has a number of mission critical requirements. These key requirements can be summed up as high security, high scalability, and cost efficiency.

Securing Digital Forensics Storage
Digital forensics systems are typically deployed as NAS systems so that they can easily integrate with the file security management systems like Active Directory (AD) used by most law enforcement agencies. Use of the SMB protocol enables one to enforce full end-to-end encryption of all file data on the network so that only those case officers and investigators assigned to a given case can access the assigned case files. QuantaStor supports full integration with AD with RFC2307 mode support for mixed Windows/Unix/Linux environments.
The second key part of securing forensics data is encryption-at-rest. This is the encryption used to protect the data on disk so that in the event that a drive is lost or disposed of that the data cannot be recovered without the security keys. QuantaStor uses software based AES256 bit encryption which is hardware accelerated by the AES-NI capabilities of the Intel and AMD server processors. The overall performance impact to enabling encryption is typically only 15% such that it has little to no impact to the workflow of storing and accessing data. By virtue of QuantaStor using software based encryption (AES-256-XTS) we’re able to support encryption on all storage media types including non-SED/FDE media.
The last key part of security is a strong authentication and authorization system so that organizations are able to control who has management access to the storage and what administrative actions they have access to. This area is know as Role Based Access Controls and QuantaStor has a patented RBAC systems that is one of the most security and flexible on the market. This enables organizations to easily create roles which limit IT admins to specific operations such as provisioning storage or adjusting access. All management operations are audit logged in CEE format to ensure compliance with NIST security standards.

Scaling Digital Forensics Solutions
QuantaStor scales horizontally as new storage servers and disk enclosures are added so that systems can scale to over 100PB per storage grid. We recommend using triple parity based data protection to ensure super high fault-tolerance and data recover-ability. In this configuration three out of every group of 12 devices can fail with zero downtime and zero data loss. QuantaStor also has bit-rot protection and auto correction which ensures that every bit of data is exactly the same as it was when written.

Controlling Costs
Digital forensics systems grow rapidly as the amount of data collected is closely correlated to population growth multiplied by Moore’s Law as the size of the SSD storage in mobile devices doubles every 18 months. QuantaStor helps make these costs controllable in two ways. First, QuantaStor is priced based on capacity with a sliding scale that reduces the cost per TB as the scale of a given deployment grows. This ensures a greater and greater price per TB as the solution grows and eliminates unexpected costs often associated with traditional systems. Second, QuantaStor is price adjusted each year to keep software subscription pricing in-line as a ratio to the hardware per TB pricing. This ensures that organizations are able to get the best hardware from the vendor of their choice with the knowledge that the combined software and hardware price will roughly align to give them the best solution at the best price for both new deployments and expansions every time. Last, QuantaStor subscription licenses include all features, maintenance, support and upgrades so there are no hidden add-on costs. New features and upgrades are included with new and existing active subscriptions with transfer-ability to new hardware.

Secure sensitive data and move it when necessary with QuantaStor Data Migration Edition.

With QuantaStor Migration Edition, a secure petabyte-scale mobile data appliance, law enforcement organizations can now transfer large amounts of data, without high network data transport costs, long data transfer times, and security. Transferring forensic data with QuantaStor Migration Edition is easy, secure, and cost effective.

QuantaStor for Law Enforcement Key Features

Security and Encryption

To counter cyber threats and ensure compliance, QuantaStor includes end-to-end security coverage enabling multi-layer data protection “on the wire” and “at rest” for enterprise and cloud storage deployments. Combining protocol-level encryption with SMB, IPsec and HTTPS across any storage grid, hardware and software disk drive encryption with Intel AES-NI technology and advanced user security featuring role-based access controls, QuantaStor end-to-end security is ideal for any law enforcement use case.

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