Exterro and Blue Lights Digital to offer digital forensics and incident response to public sector

Exterro is partnering with investigation and intelligence capacity building company Blue Lights Digital (BLD) to deliver digital forensics and incident response technology to the public sector.

Exterro software unifies digital forensics, cybersecurity compliance, data privacy and e-discovery. The agreement will see BLD will market Exterro’s full Forensic Toolkit (FTK) solutions to its existing customer base and to law enforcement, intelligence agencies and military organisations to assist them with their digital investigations and intelligence building capabilities.

The firm claims that FTK, FTK Central, FTK Lab and FTK Enterprise can help drives down data backlogs, seeing criminal cases resolved faster and suspects either released or charged.

“The value we bring to Exterro is through our established customer base across law enforcement, military policing, the MOD, and governmental agencies while Exterro’s technology covers computer and mobile device forensics as well as disparate data sources so will give us that acceleration into the forensic space,” said Nick Curry, COO, Blue Lights Digital.

In addition, BLD will offer Exterro’s wider product portfolio, including its Incident and Breach Management and Smart Breach Review, to offer Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR).

Police forces will be required to obtain accreditation to conduct on-scene DFIR examinations by October 2022. DFIR also enables other organisations to comply with regulatory requirements such as data breach notification and to proactively mitigate the risk of a breach.

Real-world problems

The BLD partnership is the first to be announced since Exterro began its partner recruitment drive at the beginning of the year and will see Exterro actively expand its presence in the UK public sector. It says it is a sector that has seen unprecedented growth over the course of the past year, with investment in software and IT services up nine percent according to TechMarketView – treble the original forecast for demand.

“Blue Lights Digital is a major coup for us because it allows us to build upon the success we’ve already had with the UK police force. The partnership allows us to provide solutions that address the real-world problems besetting forces today, from ensuring front line officers can participate in review, to dealing with case backlogs and mental wellbeing,” said Ian Rainsborough, international channel and partnerships director, Exterro.

“Data is growing exponentially and with it evidential workloads so teams need to work smarter. The only way to do that is to scale your processing capability, and FTK is renowned for processing large datasets very quickly as well as being able to scale from single to multiple users, to a lab environment, a department, an agency. It will prove invaluable in helping us advise our customers on the best way to create a scalable forensic practice,” added Paul Cook, digital forensics and technical services officer, Blue Lights Digital.