OpenText adds digital investigation to the Cloud with Microsoft Azure

OpenText announced that its EnCase Forensic and EnCase Endpoint Investigator are now certified on Microsoft Azure. With OpenText Encase solutions in the cloud, law enforcement and corporate investigators can more easily collaborate, enhance evidence processing, investigate in cloud environments, and adjust more quickly to the needs of a remote workforce.

“Industries, employees, and even criminals across the world are embracing new ways to work,” said OpenText Chief Product Officer Muhi Majzoub. “Digital forensic investigators need to be just as agile. OpenText supports the investigators at the frontlines, finding the digital evidence needed to seek justice or respond to a cyberattack. Embracing the power, scale, and efficiency of the cloud will help digital investigators be more effective.”                                                                          

OpenText worked to support Microsoft’s focus on public safety and justice to bring the benefits of Microsoft Azure – efficiency, power, and scalability – to OpenText EnCase solutions for digital investigations. Additional EnCase security solutions will be available on Azure.

“Microsoft is dedicated to delivering solutions to help public safety and justice organizations increase the safety of people and the security of the communities they serve,” said Kirk Arthur, Senior Director of Worldwide Government Industry, Microsoft. “Public sector, enterprise, and law enforcement organizations are beginning to take advantage of the scale, enterprise-grade security, and high availability of Microsoft Azure. We are pleased to see OpenText bringing the advantages of Azure to digital investigators all around the world.”

EnCase Forensic and EnCase Endpoint Investigator in Azure bring four core benefits of the cloud to law enforcement and enterprise investigators immediately:

Efficient, secure collaboration – Investigators can now tap into the power of Azure to quickly and easily share case data for better collaboration with other stakeholders via OpenText EnCase Evidence Viewer – an application that enables secure access to case data for outside consulting.

Enhanced evidence processing – Digital investigations often require analysis of terabytes of data. Traditional endpoints have hardware limitations, and processing evidence in extremely high volumes can cause unwanted delay. Investigators can now push evidence to the cloud for quick, efficient processing, alleviating the need for numerous forensic workstations.

Access to investigate evidence in the cloud – As organizations shift operations to the cloud and rely more on a universe of IoT devices, investigative teams must keep pace and increase visibility and control in cloud environments. User and application interactions in cloud environments are difficult to view and analyze without brokered access between the cloud vendor and investigative technology. With OpenText EnCase on Azure, investigators can comprehensively process digital evidence, both on-prem and in the cloud, for complete and accurate findings.

Investigate devices anytime, anywhere, with less reliance on corporate network or VPN – COVID-19 forced many businesses to new work-from-home models, complicating the task of corporate investigators to investigate employee devices for evidence of insider threat, HR issues, or other internal investigations. With OpenText EnCase Investigator, corporate investigators can more easily reach out through the cloud to access employee devices and conduct investigations, without disrupting employee productivity.

“Digital investigators, be they law enforcement or corporate investigators, must collect, decrypt, process, and analyze evidence from a wide variety of devices and data repositories while maintaining the highest degrees of data integrity,” said OpenText Chief Product Officer Muhi Majzoub. “OpenText EnCase is recognized globally as the market leader for digital forensics. Microsoft Azure lets us tap into the processing power and efficiency of the cloud to deliver better, faster results to investigators.”