Migration to governmental cloud digital forensics community: Economics and methodology

Abstract

The rapid growth of elastic computing services, together with a raising need to target savings, enable new IT scenarios. In particular, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) can benefit of digital forensic services sharing, lowering CAPEX and OPEX especially in case of spiky utilization of forensic hardware and software resources. In fact, considering the workloads related to the size of a forensic organizational unit, the capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX) differently afflict the overall cost incurred to provide response to crime investigation. Hence, Government cloud community SaaS model, under strict security requirements, can represent a viable solution to dramatically lower costs of forensics units. This paper evaluates the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of in-house forensic farm and the TCO of a SaaS deployed as a government community cloud, providing Forensic as a Service to N forensic units. The costs assessment are part of the evaluation methodology to calculate the number of forensic crime cases needed to switch to Government cloud model from multiple independent forensic labs.