Reclaim time in your digital investigations with Magnet One: Part 4 – Simplify your data management 

This is the fourth entry in a four-part series showing you how Magnet One helps your digital forensics lab save time and effort in your investigations. Read our previous entries, Part 1 – Combining speed with accuracy, Part 2 – Accelerate your workflows with Magnet One, and Part 3 – Collaborate with ease.

Managing the vast amounts of data generated in today’s investigations has become a major challenge for digital forensics labs. Not only do you need to acquire, process, and analyze the ever-growing volumes of digital evidence coming into your lab, but you must also find a way to securely and reliably manage it throughout your entire investigative lifecycle – any lapse in data availability, integrity, or chain of custody can compromise your entire investigation and derail a prosecution.

Unfortunately, if you’re like many labs today you’re struggling with outdated in-house storage methods that aren’t up to the task—you may even still be relying on DVDs, tapes, or an old server in the closet! These methods simply can’t provide the performance, reliability, and scale you need to handle the massive and growing volumes of data from your investigations. What happens if a hard drive containing vital evidence dies, or you run out of storage in the middle of a high-profile case?

To make matters worse, your case data may be spread out over multiple locations in your lab or across your agency, making the task of providing access and maintaining compliance with your security, retention, and deletion policies a real nightmare.

You also need someone to manage your storage solution to ensure it’s properly deployed and functions as required. This often requires specialized IT resources that may not exist in your lab today.

Additionally, you need to consider the long-term costs of data storage—how will your lab budget to scale with the relentless pace of data growth? Traditional on-premises storage solutions can make this task extremely difficult.

The burden of adequately managing the huge volumes of data generated by your investigations not only causes high levels of worry and stress for you and your team, but it also costs considerable time and money.

Magnet One’s secure cloud storage offers you a solution to the growing data management problem, helping to reduce the effort and costs of supporting digital forensics data storage in your lab so you can spend less time worrying about your data and more time working your cases!

Included for free with your Magnet product license, Magnet One includes 250GB of storage space you can start using today to attach and share files with your case members, with the option to add more space to meet your lab’s broader data storage needs.

Purpose-built for digital investigations

Magnet One’s integrated storage isn’t your typical cloud storage solution—it was designed specifically with the unique needs of digital investigations in mind. By storing your case data in Magnet One, you’ll get the storage capacity, management, and access you need while also ensuring data security and integrity throughout the entire investigative lifecycle, saving your team time and reducing stress, risk, and cost.

• Scalable, reliable cloud technology: Unlike traditional on-premises systems, Magnet One offers flexible, reliable, high-performance cloud storage so you’ll always have the space you need, no matter how large your caseload—and no more worrying about that old server!
• Simplified management: With all your case data stored in one secure, reliable platform, the task of managing your data is greatly simplified. Magnet One handles system management for you, lifting a huge burden from your lab. No hardware to deploy and maintain and no special IT management skills required!
• Centralized data access: With all your case data stored in one secure, reliable platform, providing access is also greatly simplified. Your entire investigative team is connected to all their case data from anywhere in real-time, with role-based permissions to control access.
• Secure and compliant: With Magnet One’s advanced security and management features, you can rest assured your sensitive case data is always protected. Hosted on AWS and leveraging their industry-leading security measures, Magnet One storage is designed to be compliant with recognized standards and best practices.
• Predictable costs: Get cost effective data storage with no surprises. Magnet One’s cloud storage enables you to more accurately predict and budget for storage without the hidden costs often encountered with purchasing and maintaining your own hardware.

Organize your case files and share with ease

Keeping your investigations organized is easy with Magnet One. You can simply attach documents, extractions, photos, and other investigative files to your cases for all to see. This means less time wasted transferring files and more time spent moving your case forward.

When viewing a specific case, you’ll see a ‘Files’ tab in the case dashboard, which will show any files that have been attached to the case along with their relevant details. Any case member will be able to access these shared files. You can easily add new items using the ‘Add’ drop down menu and sort them according to their metadata.

Easily upload and manage all your data

In addition to case attachments, Magnet One storage also includes the ability to upload larger files in bulk and organize them as you like. You’ll be able to upload, view, and manage any file through Magnet One’s ‘Storage’ tab and control access via role-based permissions.

Magnet One also includes a new desktop uploader tool you can use to make the process even faster and easier. Simply choose any number of files to quickly archive them to Magnet One, with status bars to monitor progress. Magnet One’s file security protocols ensure your data is protected and validated at rest and in-transit.

Magnet One storage integrations coming soon

In addition to the exciting storage and sharing capabilities above, we’ll be adding more advanced storage features to Magnet One that will save you even more time and effort in your lab!

Today, Magnet One connects with your Magnet tools like Magnet Axiom, Magnet Graykey, and Magnet Review to help you easily share data across your applications. With our upcoming integrations with Magnet One storage, you’ll soon be able to automatically upload images and evidence from these tools for secure storage and sharing.

Simplify your storage with Magnet One

Magnet One gives you 250GB for free – simply activate your Magnet One account to experience the future of digital forensics data storage today! If you’re interested in learning more about how Magnet One storage can help your lab tackle the data management challenge, please visit our product page or reach out to our experts.