Law Enforcement

Overview

This law enforcement agency’s mission is to safeguard the United States from a variety of national security and criminal threats – from physical attacks to cyber-based attacks. Executing this mission generates an extreme amount of data, of all different types and formats, that is used during investigations and as evidence in prosecuting court cases. This data must be securely captured, analyzed, managed, stored, and available to stakeholders when and where needed.

Challenge

This agency’s overarching goal is to modernize its technology infrastructure in support of the mission. Part of this goal is to enhance information sharing both within the agency and with other agencies and organizations. One challenge inherent in the need to efficiently and securely share information is the sheer amount of data that needs to be shared – all with different formats, types, and sensitivities. All data collected, analyzed, and shared by this agency has the added challenge of becoming evidence in complex legal proceedings that can be governed by many different regulations. This data must adhere to strict rules and protocols for chain of custody, where and how it is stored; while also providing flexibility to adapt to a fluid legal landscape. These rules result in the need for defined and tightly controlled data flows between collection and storage repositories and stakeholders – all with different requirements.

Solution

The types and amounts of data captured by this agency, coupled with their demanding performance requirements and unique custody rules, called for an enterprise cross-domain transfer solution that could provide extremely fast transfer rates (up to 9 Gb/s) on readily-available commodity hardware. High Speed Guard™, from Forcepoint™, meets and exceeds these requirements. High Speed Guard provides this customer with the ability to securely and rapidly move eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based Web service messages from sensitive networks to less-restricted networks (high-to-low transfer). The High Speed Guard rules governing data movement through specific channels provide this customer with assurance that the data is handled to specifications and can be located at any point when the need arises.

The agency’s initial implementation called for multiple High Speed Guard systems to support various sites and included initial rule set development, integration support, training, and Assessment and Authorization (A&A) documentation templates. Due to the success experienced with the initial rollout, the agency purchased additional High Speed Guard systems that allowed them to increase capability, throughput, and performance in service of their mission.

After receiving High Speed Guard training from Forcepoint’s engineers, the agency is able to independently maintain all aspects of their High Speed Guard implementation, from rule set updates and data channel modifications to end-user troubleshooting and problem resolution. Site personnel also apply High Speed Guard minor release updates with limited phone support from Forcepoint’s Customer Support.

Results

High Speed Guard contains highly-flexible plain text rule sets and filters that provide the ability to validate nearly limitless types of structured data. The rule language combined with the high performance inherent in High Speed Guard allows this agency to consolidate multiple data flows onto fewer physical systems. High Speed Guard’s ease of administration provides the agency with full on-site control from a single point; which allows them to modify High Speed Guard configurations on-demand as well as manage auditing and backups without vendor intervention.

Summary

With the inclusion of High Speed Guard in their architecture, this Law Enforcement agency is able to efficiently and securely control the flow of investigative data between all their varied capture, analysis and storage systems, while also meeting cross-agency information sharing mandates. High Speed Guard’s inherently flexible rule engine allows this customer to develop file transfer validation filters for virtually any structured data. This provides a highly secure and efficient system that supports the agency’s mission while also reducing infrastructure costs.