CSI: Round Rock – Dell Launches Digital Forensics Service

Dell is looking to help law enforcement quickly collect and analyze digital evidence via a new data-center and cloud-based Dell Digital Forensics Solution.

We don’t know if Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, or Gary Sinise will make guest appearances, but computer maker Dell is planning to roll out a new Dell Digital Forensics Solution, which will offer a data-center and cloud-based approach toward quickly gathering, managing, and analyzing digital evidence in law enforcement investigations and operations. Dell is launching the service with a collection of industry partners including Intel, Symantec, EMC, VEGA, Oracle, and others, and will enable multiple law enforcement analysts to work on the same data sets at the same time without interfering with each other, in contrast to the “white room” approach used by many law enforcement agencies where digital evidence is typically isolated to a single standalone workstation and analyst.

Dell is presenting the service to the UK’s Association of Chief Police Officers today, and seems to be initially targeting the UK and European markets with the service—but that may just reflect where Dell is introducing the service, since the company recently reorganized around business segments (one of which was the public sector) rather than geographical regions.

“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 analyze data quickly and accurately to help secure arrests and convictions,” wrote Josh Claman, in a company blog. “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.”

Research firm IDC recently estimated the United States market for digital forensics services would be worth over $600 million this year; other estimates put the international market for similar services around $2 billion by the year 2012.