accessdata.

com The Way Forward for Digital Forensics |

 TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Why Existing I.T. Solutions Are Falling Short | pg 3

2. Forensic Challenges By Industry | pg 4

3. The Changing Nature of Investigations | pg 5-7

4. The Way Forward | pg 8-12

5. A Better Way | pg 13-14

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 WHY EXISTING I.T. SOLUTIONS
ARE FALLING SHORT

It’s challenging times for organizations and professionals engaged in forensic analysis
and e-discovery. Investigations are multiplying and diversifying – there are more of them,
and new types of cases arise all the time. Spurred by global trends, such as BYOD (bring
your own device), proliferating privacy regulation, and cloud computing, the environment
for conducting effective investigations has become increasingly complex and more difficult
to negotiate than ever before. Across all sectors, investigations are becoming more collab-
orative, now frequently drawing in staff from HR and other departments who are not legal
professionals, but need to interact with forensic technologies.

What this means is that existing forensic tools and technologies can’t always provide the
kind of performance needed to keep up with the growing investigation load, and can’t
accommodate the changing nature of how investigations must be managed. Forensics
professionals are confronting much larger data loads, with new, complex information types
tapped from a growing diversity of sources. As volumes and complexity increase, meeting
deadlines and reaching beneficial outcomes becomes more difficult.

Surely, what’s needed are new solutions – more powerful, flexible forensic technologies
that can handle big, diverse data loads faster than existing platforms. But it’s not just about
more processing power. Investigators need better indexing, higher scalability and nimbler
collection capabilities. Just as important, today’s solutions must accommodate the changing
nature of investigations and empower diversifying teams. More than anything, today’s
solutions need to be smarter.

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 FORENSIC CHALLENGES
BY INDUSTRY

CORPORATIONS
Today’s corporations are dealing with enormous amounts of digital data, all being shared among
teams, departments, global locations, and devices. Even in industries as varied as healthcare to
finance to energy, enterprises need to manage digital investigations and e-discovery faster, more
efficiently and more securely, while reducing cost. Additionally, it’s critical to have a global view while
applying standards to data activity. Varying data privacy regulations, as well as regional risks and
communication practices, must all be taken into consideration to ensure data security and improved
efficiency. Finding tools to help you create the appropriate balance between collecting relevant
evidence for investigations and maintaining privacy rights should be priority number one.

PUBLIC SECTOR
Along with the perennial challenge of cash-strapped budgets, public sector organizations today are
grappling with increased backlog from growing, more complex caseloads. More than ever, it’s critical
that teams can zero in on relevant evidence fast, and build cases to fight fraud and other crimes
endemic to government and the public sector. What’s needed are tools to locate and analyze data
often unavailable through conventional processes, allowing examiners and investigators to collect
key evidence quickly and with confidence.

LAW FIRMS
More and more, law firms want to better serve their clients by simplifying their e-discovery processes
and reducing costs. This can be a tough challenge with today’s caseloads where millions of docu-
ments and terabytes of data are commonplace. To make e-discovery more efficient, you need access
to integrated tools for processing, review, and case organization. And you need a real-time review
platform that allows secure collaboration, regardless of where any member of the litigation team
is located.

SERVICE PROVIDERS
Multinational service providers, consultants, and accounting organizations have unique business
challenges that cut across the corporate and legal world. Like law firms, service providers need to be
able to carry out complex e-discovery projects. They’re also expected to provide expert support for
international compliance efforts. As such, there’s an urgent need for tools that can support globally
dispersed investigatory teams and real-time collaboration. And as with large enterprises, service
providers need to balance evidence collection and privacy rights.

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 THE CHANGING NATURE
OF INVESTIGATIONS –
More Investigations,
Surging Costs

Talk to people who conduct investigations for a living, and you’ll hear some common themes.
Investigations today involve more data, from more and more sources. Investigators are also work-
ing with increasingly complex information types, many of which can be difficult to access. Overall,
there are just more investigations to conduct, with tightening deadlines and greater pressures to
rein in costs.

To get a better handle on these issues, we surveyed C-level executives across a broad range of
organizations. What we found puts some hard numbers behind the anecdotal evidence. With the
enormous investigation load investigators are juggling, the biggest challenges are time, cost, and
efficiency in managing across the organization.

57% 51% 47%

Firms citing time / cost of Number of respondents
Respondents identifying
investigations as a major identifying difficulties in
lack of access to data a
challenge major challenge technology integration as
a challenge to conducting
investigations

Source for all data graphics: 2016 Survey – IDG Enterprise

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 THE CHANGING NATURE
OF INVESTIGATIONS –
Increasing Workloads
Are Shifting Priorities

New Investigations Kick Off Every Week

Weekly cadence is the new normal for investigations, as teams increasingly
struggle with compliance, data security and incident response.

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 THE CHANGING NATURE
OF INVESTIGATIONS –
Breaches, Regulations &
The IoT

Our study also found that executives are becoming more focused on data security in light of
high-profile data breaches that have tarnished brands such as Facebook, Google, Marriott,
British Airways, and dozens of other tech and consumer brands in recent years. Additionally,
data privacy legislation such as the EU’s GDPR and state-level regulations in the U.S. are driving
greater awareness of security issues and leading to more investigation activity. Increasingly,
C-level executives want reassurance from their cybersecurity teams that their data is secure
and the company is compliant.
“
“
How do you ensure compliance and that employees are
protecting your data when accessing it from cell phones,
smart watches, or other new emerging devices?

Trends driving increases in investigation activity and challenges to effective investigations:

Increased awareness
driven by public breaches
and growing compliance
demands are spurring
growth in investigations.

Increasingly mobile
workforce driven by
BYOD, remote
work places. Sprawl: how does
IT ensure they have
visibility across all of
the endpoints where
their data resides?

The rise of the Internet

of Things is generating new data from
new devices and business processes
(smart car / smart home) that could be
relevant in an investigation.

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 THE WAY FORWARD –
Cross-Team Collaboration

There’s growing consensus that effective collaboration is a key to success when managing
investigations. No longer can teams be siloed as the data that must be collected expands to
different teams and devices. This holds true for forensic investigations whether at the corporate
level or in the public sector. At the same time, with HR, compliance, and legal playing a more
active role in data preservation, as well as collection and analysis as part of investigations, organi-
zations need to facilitate better collaboration between teams. The need is especially acute when
outside counsel, law firms or service providers are brought into an investigation. Given these
realities, decision-makers are increasingly demanding integrated tools that enable and foster that
collaboration without requiring unnecessary data movement, longer timeframes or higher costs.

COLLABORATION IS KEY TO SUCCESS OF DIGITAL INVESTIGATIONS

Level of importance of collaboration between

HR, IT, and investigative teams to the success
of digital investigations

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 THE WAY FORWARD –
Technologies Optimized to
Meet Emerging Challenges

To conduct successful investigations in today’s challenging environment, you need an end-to-

end solution that will enable investigators to find relevant evidence as quickly as possible.

CORE PLATFORM – What to Look For:

• Speed & Stability: Distributed processing and ability to leverage multi-
thread/multi-core computers to realize full potential of hardware resources.
• Up-front indexing for more efficient filtering and searching: The difference
is that whether you’re investigating or performing document review, you have
a shared index file, eliminating the need to recreate or duplicate files.
• Built on a single unified database: Single data store ensures that your data
doesn’t have to move between separate, disparate platforms, and products
thereby introducing risk and potentially disrupting the chain of custody.

o With conventional approaches – which lack a forensically secure
back-end database – data must pass between platforms and tools.
The result is that every time you have to move your data, you risk
corruption or potential loss – not to mention added cost.

o A connected database means your cross-functional teams can
more easily collaborate on an investigation, speeding resolution
times for your investigations.

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 THE WAY FORWARD –
What to Look for in
Digital Forensics

Forensic investigations today frequently need to cut across distributed digital teams, with an
overwhelming amount of data to process. From multiple office locations, to massive employee
pools and remote workers, investigators need enterprise tool sets that provide deep visibility
into live data directly at the endpoint, helping you conduct faster, more targeted enterprise-wide,
post-breach HR and compliance investigations.

ENTERPRISE PLATFORM CAPABILITIES – What To Look For:

• Optimizes support for internal investigations conducted by HR, IT, or other
non-legal stakeholders.
• Ability to respond quickly, remotely, and covertly (deployed to a specific
machine / laptop / workstation / file share ) while maintaining chain of custody.
• Facilitates focused forensic investigations and post-breach analysis, without
interruption to business operations.
• Eliminates need to travel / shipping costs to have physical access to machines
to perform collections.
• Provides pause / resume functionality so that once a collection is started,
if the machine were to go offline, the job will resume once it is back online.

CENTRALIZED PLATFORM CAPABILITIES – What To Look For:

• Facilitates collaborative analysis utilizing a distributed workforce across
geographic locations, including cases requiring a cross-discipline approach
among attorneys, HR, IT, or other parties across functional disciplines.
• Ability to power through massive data sets, handle various data types and
run multiple cases at the same time, all within a collaborative,
scalable environment.
• Supports distributed processing, allowing investigators to utilize additional
hardware to dramatically increase case processing and resolution
speed as needed.
• Incorporates powerful web-based review functionality and expanded
processing capabilities with a centralized database infrastructure and
virtually limitless scalability (depending on your hardware).
• Provides data visualization that supports deeper analysis by uncovering
relationships and patterns to support better decision making, leading to
more favorable outcomes.

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 THE WAY FORWARD –
The Promise of
Artificial Intelligence
The shifting nature of investigative challenges – more of them, and of ever-increasing
complexity – has drawn a logical response from technology developers serving the space.
We see this in new integrated investigatory systems that offer faster processing capabilities,
more powerful databases, higher scalability, and tighter team integration for more effective
collaboration. All of these have advanced the cause for dedicated investigative professionals
as well as their colleagues in HR, IT, and others who frequently contribute to investigations. But
where the future of automated digital forensic tools truly lays is in machine learning and artificial
intelligence (AI).

AI: You’re Soaking In It!

Artificial intelligence is frequently portrayed as a technology of the future, something that won’t
play a role in day-to-day life until many years into the future. Not so – it’s already something we
encounter on a daily basis. When you search for a show to watch and Netflix suggests a new
series based on your viewing history, that’s AI in action. Same thing when you log onto Amazon,
and it suggest books or other products tailored to your interests. This kind of logarithmic sorting,
which increases in accuracy and utility over time, has direct application to technology offerings
used to manage the investigatory process.

For legal review: Speeds linear review and delivers results that are transparent
and legally defensible. Document clustering and predictive coding capabilities
leverage machine learning to automatically categorize documents.

For E-discovery: Improves response efficiency with rapid access, capture and
analysis of vast document sets in a single integrated solution. Systematic lit
hold and targeted data collection provide results that are defensible throughout
the EDRM.

For single investigations: Empowers single investigators to streamline investigations,

allowing you to open and work any case regardless of its original database version.

For collaborative investigations: Improves support of the unique workflow of

forensics labs, making it easier for investigation teams to locate, understand
and report on key pieces of data. Plus, automated tasking and integrated
collaboration tools for assisted investigations.

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 THE WAY FORWARD –
Harnessing the Power of
Machine Learning

The nature of machine learning is that through repetition and observation over time, solutions
can deliver faster performance and improved outcomes. In the context of digital forensics, we’re
seeing that with these new technologies investigative teams can be empowered at every skill
level to conduct and close more accurate, advanced investigations on shorter timeframes. The
performance of the digital forensic tools you already know and trust gets elevated, providing
even greater control over the way you process, locate, analyze and report on key pieces of data.
The difference machine learning can make has effects across the investigative spectrum:

Exert Greater Control Over Visual Data

Integrated visualizations, including timelines, maps, charts and social
communications analysis, along with image recognition, including facial
recognition from a single photo, power lightning-fast reviews.

Reveal Connections and Discover Insights

Advanced tools make it easy to search data across cases and develop
deep cross-evidence insights; analyze volumes of information quickly and
make large, diverse data sets more digestible.

Guide Current and Future Investigations

Machine-learning capabilities make it possible to monitor every step to
help surface more accurate and relevant findings, faster; maximize resources
with available tools for establishing workflows, automating tasks and
collaborating across teams.

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 A BETTER WAY

Meet AccessData
From day one, the founders of AccessData were driven by the vision to
harness the power of digital forensics to zero in on relevant evidence faster
and better. We create enterprise-class solutions that help clients dramatically
decrease time to actionable intelligence. Now, 30 years later, we remain the
pioneer in digital investigations.

A Smarter Approach
With AccessData, you get a true end-to-end solution that is built on a single
unified database. It’s an important difference, meaning that your data doesn’t
have to move between separate, disparate platforms, and products, which can
introduce risk and cost and potentially disrupt the chain of custody. With other
solutions, data must pass between platforms and tools as none of our compet-
itors offer a suite of tools that share the same, forensically secure back-end
database. And as you know, every time you have to move your data, you risk
corruption or potential loss – not to mention added cost. A connected database
means your cross-functional teams can easily collaborate on an investigation
more efficiently, speeding resolution times for your investigations.

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 Proven Worldwide
AccessData has worked with
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Whether it’s for investigation, litigation or compliance, AccessData® offers industry-leading solutions that put the power of
forensics in your hands. For over 30 years, AccessData has worked with more than 130,000 clients in law enforcement,
government agencies, corporations and law firms around the world to understand and focus on their unique collection-to-
analysis needs. The result? Products that empower faster results, better insights, and more connectivity. For more information,
visit www.accessdata.com

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