Capita on ‘Cloud 9’ with support for digital policing

EvidenceWorks®, Capita’s enterprise digital evidence management suite, has been selected and approved on the Government’s G-Cloud 9 by the UK Digital Marketplace

The service is a securely hosted, fully managed, open and scalable purpose-built digital evidence management solution for UK police, which includes the “capability to ingest, catalogue, store, analyse and share media from multiple digital sources”.

The Government’s G-Cloud is an initiative launched in 2012 targeted at easing procurement by public sector bodies of “commodity information technology services that use cloud computing”. It consists of:

•A series of framework agreements with suppliers, from which public sector organisations can buy services without needing to run a full tender or competition procurement process; and

•An online store – the ‘Digital Marketplace’ – that allows public sector bodies to search for services that are covered by the G-Cloud frameworks.

The Government says cloud computing has “caused a significant change in the way information systems can be delivered” and the G-Cloud programme of work is designed to “deliver computing-based capability (from fundamental resources such as storage and processing to full-fledged applications) using cloud computing”.

Capita says it used “knowledge and experience gained as a leading supplier to both police and the criminal justice sector, and the market leader in digital interview systems in the UK”, to develop EvidenceWorks.

It provides a secure, open and scalable network repository for the management of digital evidence from:

•Digital interviews — either EvidenceWorks IRS (interview recording solution) or third-party devices;

•Body-worn video;

•Crime scene imagery;

•CCTV;

•Mobile phone pictures and videos and other public-provided media; and

•ANPR (automatic numberplate recognition) and other in-vehicle video.

“The use of digital technology is expanding exponentially to cover all aspects of life,” says Capita.

“To handle the vast volumes from digital sources, police and criminal justice agencies worldwide need to deploy robust solutions to effectively capture, ingest, secure, analyse, use and share all this potentially evidential material.

“EvidenceWorks is a proven enterprise solution that has been built specifically to support the digital future of policing by: reducing the risk of data loss through secure, robust storage and data sharing capabilities; and cost saving through the removal of the need for media storage and transport.”

Capita says it provides “continuity of evidence from ‘capture to court’ of digital assets — securely and consistently managing all digital evidence”.

Benefits include a full audit trail, support for the MoPI (management of police information) guidance and process and a single point of data streaming and transfer.

“It provides every police officer with the tools to manage digital evidence,” says Capita.