Storage solutions for policing in the digital era

As UK police forces continue their digital transformations, adopting new technologies to support officers and improve service, IT departments are being put under more pressure to manage rapidly growing, unstructured data. Each day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90% of all the world’s data was created in the past two years. Wherever you hold your data, IBM’s storage solutions, delivered by SCC, have been designed to integrate simply into hybrid cloud environments.

The challenge – digital evidence requirements

In a single day, Body Worn Video (BWV) captured by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) totals 52tB of data. This is data that simply did not exist just a few years ago. This and other police data must be stored – whether it is ever accessed or not – in order to support criminal investigations. If it is assumed that just 7% of police video is evidential, which the Management of Police Information (MOPI) suggests keeping for 7-99 years, evidential BWV from MPS alone will total more than 100 Petabytes by 2022. By 2026, digital evidence will be approaching 1 Exabyte. When collecting digital evidence, police forces must gather data from several sources, including police officers, CCTV, and online platforms such as social media. They must adhere to strict MOPI guidelines and ensure data is audited and secure. They need to be able to easily share data with investigators and prosecution services and keep reliable back-ups. The data must be readily available and resilient. Using the existing police approach to storing, managing, and sharing data needs to change.

The solution – IBM Storage solutions, in partnership with SCC

IBM Storage solutions, in partnership with SCC, make storage simple – reducing costs, adding resilience, and delivering the highest service levels.

• The IBM Spectrum software suite offers integrated data and storage management software that provides monitoring, automation, and analytics for storage. It is scalable, secure, and enables virtualisation of block storage environments on-prem and public cloud to improve efficiency, reduce cost, and simplify management. IBM Spectrum Archive provides direct, intuitive, and graphical access to data stored in IBM tape drives and libraries, and IBM Spectrum Discover is designed for Exabyte-scale file and object storage with hybrid multi-cloud support.
• IBM FlashSystem 5000 is one family of systems with innovation for deployments of all sizes that are simple to operate, simple to configure, and simple to acquire. Many police forces are using it to find cost efficiencies and better manage increasing volumes of evidential data. The scalability and high availability provided by IBM FlashSystem is helping police forces cope with the demands digital policing. Find out more about the IBM FlashSystem 5000 here.
• IBM Cloud Object Store (COS) reduces storage costs by up to 70%, providing storage that scales with today’s workloads – ideal for video footage and evidence. Parallel concurrent accessible data from anywhere enables the sharing of evidential data quickly between forces and other law enforcement organisations. IBM COS keeps data online and is easy to manage with extreme data durability and no downtimes or data migrations. It also has the highest security standards built in.
• IBM Tape Storage enables scalable, log-term retention of evidential data adhering to MOPI policies. It is secure, with airgap security, encryption and WORM, and the most cost-effective type of security – particularly with the challenge of spiralling storage costs.

Get started with a Storage Assessment

The task of understanding how effectively police forces use data storage infrastructure is an on-going challenge for IT departments. All storage transformation projects require an accurate picture of the current environment before the journey to a fully optimised architecture can begin. Storage Assessment from IBM can provide this understanding. The assessment provides in depth multi-vendor information about both your primary and back-up storage environments, wherever your data resides – on premise or in the cloud. IBM provides a comprehensive single pane report showing your existing storage plus a comparison with a strategic aligned target solution, that will be extremely useful whatever storage vendor you subsequently select. The assessment is completed through the use of a light-touch meta-data only approach to data collection, that has been tried and tested globally with thousands of customers in multi-vendor environments. Produced within 3-5 days of data collection and combined with a follow up workshop, this is an ideal way to visualise how your storage and backup capabilities could align with the demands of your business.

As an SCC customer, if you find a better competitive price, IBM will price match across each of its FlashSystem 5000 solutions. Click here for more information and to price match

Why SCC and IBM? — SCC has partnered with IBM for almost 40 years, bridging the gap between business needs and technology to deliver world-class solutions. From IBM’s technology to its people and vision, we work with our customers to deliver the strongest, most agile solutions. With a specialist dedicated IBM team, we are able to offer that extra support needed when helping our customers plan, integrate and manage their projects.

 

Get in touch