Background: the explosion of digital data

From body worn camera footage to digital forensics evidence, the quantity of digital data being held and processed by police organisations has exploded over the last twenty years. Police forces and organisations have invested to keep up with demand but having a single centralised storage facility is practically unheard of. In reality there is usually a mixture of storage and management systems, serving the needs of specific departments and disciplines. Even large scale record management systems don’t store everything.

With terabytes of data, it has become a challenge for forces to fully utilise all their digital assets, with little prospect of an expensive and disruptive move to centralised storage. After evidential data is identified for a specific use, forces must also ensure secure communication to partner agencies and service providers. The end result of all these problems is a significant administrative cost burden on police staff.

The Corvus Digital Asset and evidential Management (DAM) and Digital Asset Delivery (DAD) systems were created to solve these problems.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

The Corvus digital asset and evidential management system provides the ability to mix a local storage capability with remote access and indexing of any type of file, media and digital content. This means that any existing investment can be incorporated within a complete asset management solution without needing to replace or rebuild. This approach also minimises the impact of change and promotes a ‘network friendly’ methodology. Files are stored or indexed in their native format to preserve evidential integrity, but can also be converted to allow wider sharing – maximising the intelligence benefit of the asset.

Corvus DAM collates metadata for all digital assets and provides a range of supporting functionality including flexible searching based on case or asset details and built-in video previews. Ask us a question or contact us to find out more.

Under The Bonnet

The system functions by carrying out automated analysis according to your configured indexing policy. This can be combined with the automatic loading of data directly into the Corvus repository. The ability to index data across a variety of links, keywords and descriptions ensures that the system delivers an extremely powerful search capability whilst retaining the simplicity that is so important for use by a wide range of personnel.

Digital Asset Delivery (DAD)

One of the most difficult challenges that an organisation faces is the ability to share information securely with partners. The Digital Asset Delivery component addresses this concern by implementing a secure portal available to any designated and authorised recipients. The publishing organisation takes ownership of the publishing and delivery process by managing the list of approved originators (senders), recipients and security configuration.

Once digital material is published, it becomes available for download by the recipients. The originator sets a limit on the period of time during which the assets must be downloaded. Recipients receive an email notification containing embedded links to direct them to the downloadable ‘bundle’.

Benefits and Features

• Efficient and Convenient
  • Extensive search capability
  • Support for case working
  • Integrated content player
  • Reduced administration
  • Cost Savings
• Secure
  • Flexible security and privilege model
  • Secure transfer of digital assets
  • Full security accreditation
  • Time expired access model
• Data Standards
  • Automatic indexing, linking and data extraction
  • Industry standard data exchange
• Compliance
  • Full audit trail

Corvus Digital Asset Management and Digital Asset Delivery are founded on the Corvus Platform and the Corvus Operational Data Store which help police organisations to combine data from disparate source systems. Both are in use by Regional Scientific Support Services.