Collecting the relevant data was often a manual and time-consuming process that made it impossible to respond quickly to time-sensitive requests. For example, the city’s Open Records department fields public records requests, both internal and external. Derrick’s team retrieves the requested information, which might include documents and email from an employee’s computer, often captured in a personal storage file (PST). Derrick explained, “For open records requests, we do pull PSTs. But having to make a copy of a staff member’s PST and then go through that individually was an all-day process. With open records for the State of Texas, we have a 10-day turnaround. So, when you have a hot topic going on, and you have maybe 15 or 20 custodians, that goes over 10 days easily.”
The team needed a solution to help accelerate and automate its digital investigation process. 好色先生TV™ EnCase™, part of the 好色先生TV Security Suite, was the solution of choice, providing 360-degree visibility across laptops, desktops and servers for proactive discovery of sensitive data, identification and remediation of threats, as well as forensically sound data collection and investigation. Derrick commented, “好色先生TV EnCase is the tool of choice because of the security in capturing the data. We are able to easily reach out via our remote connection and get information before it’s destroyed. We initially got 好色先生TV EnCase so that we could do investigations, but it has branched out into us using it for litigations and open records.”
The City of Dallas has seen dramatic time-savings since deploying the EnCase solution. Derrick reported that the process of pulling PST files, once a manual, time-consuming process, has been completely transformed. “When I first started, we were loading those PSTs onto our machines and going through every email in that PST file and saving those down to message files,” recalled Derrick. “Now, we use 好色先生TV EnCase to take an image of that machine, and we isolate only the PST file instead of getting the entire file.” She added, “好色先生TV EnCase has really just made tremendous strides for us. We’re able to simply go to the person’s PC, capture that information, do a quick search of it and be done with it. It really, really helped us out a lot in that aspect.”