Crown Prosecution Service declares 'war on disks' is almost over

The CPS has transformed the way it handles multimedia, to raise security and lower costs

The Crown Prosecution Service is the public prosecuting authority for England and Wales, and getting the right evidence, securely, is critical to ensuring accurate prosecutions. For many years the organisation relied on physical media, delivered from the police by couriers on CDs and DVDs, but that process was slow, expensive and inefficient - leading Mark Gray, Director of Digital Transformation, to declare "war on disks" shortly after joining in 2016.

After a crime has been committed the police collect evidence from the scene, including notes, images and - increasingly - video from CCTV, mobile phones and body-worn cameras. In the past, officers would deliver this information to the CPS on CD or DVD, and stakeholders in the case would pass these physically between them. This process was time-consuming and carried a risk of data protection breaches - like a courier losing a CD, or it being mis-filed. The implications of lost data in the justice system, possibly including the names and addresses of victims and witnesses, could be catastrophic. The CPS had to find a better alternative.

From an IT perspective, the CPS has transformed itself over the last 10 years: first moving its core workflows from paper to digital, then transforming its use of technology, and finally looking at its processes.

Gray said: "In keeping with many organisations, we got to a point where perhaps the technology hadn't fully kept up with the pace of change to digital working. We've been investing over the last few years to make sure that our technology is fit for purpose, is user-centric, is future-proofed and is suitably transformed." The CPS, he says, is "somewhere towards the end of phase two, the start of phase three."

We got to a point where perhaps the technology hadn't fully kept up with the pace of change to digital working

Moving away from physical media to address data protection and efficiency issues was a great change in how CPS operates, and technology transformation went hand-in-hand with process change. The evaluation of new solutions began in late 2016, and in March 2017 the organisation chose and began to implement Secure Workspace: a collaboration and file-sharing tool developed by Egress.

"We said we need to stop the disks going out: even if we still get the material on disk - because we obviously can influence but we can't control that - we need to stop it going any further," says Gray. "It's inefficient, it's insecure and it's costly as a mechanism. And that was the rationale for our work with Egress around setting up such that, if a piece of evidence arrives, either from a disk or from a digital system, we upload that material into the Egress platform and thereafter no disk is required."

Under the new system, multiple stakeholders around CPS can access the file at the same time and in locations outside the office. Courts, and the side for the defence, can also view the evidence through a hyperlink, negating the need for CDs as soon as they enter CPS.

Crown Prosecution Service declares 'war on disks' is almost over

The CPS has transformed the way it handles multimedia, to raise security and lower costs

Holding to a standard

CPS works with all 43 of the police forces in England and Wales, each with its own way of handling evidence. Some remain tied to CDs and DVDs, while others are in the middle of a digital transition.

"Some are kind of end-to-end systems; some we have to download from and then re-upload; some there can be a direct connection to Egress; and some are still sending physical disks - so there's no kind of single standard model there."

Demonstrating the diversity of tech CPS deals with, the forces that have moved to digital send their files in different formats; while some are MP4, others use the DVD format VOB. That means uploading multiple items, as VOBs feature additional metadata in the form of IFO and BUP files, and requiring a download before playing the video instead of streaming within the platform. To address this, Egress has developed a file conversion app, which the CPS plans to roll out this year, that converts these files to MP4 as part of the upload process.

We have a degree of expertise, and that makes us well-placed to work with and support those [police] forces

The Service standardises everything from the point of entry into the organisation, and has begun to work with police forces facing similar issues. For example, it has articulated a small number of standards - like the ability to control the onward access to the defence and courts - that any multimedia system needs to meet, as well as defining business processes and technical flows.

Gray says, "We're conscious that, increasingly in this space, we have a degree of expertise from having done it with lots of different forces and with the Egress system ourselves, and so that makes us well-placed to work with and support those forces and other investigators."

A matter of scale

The understanding of Secure Workspace did not come overnight. As with any new technology deployment, CPS went through some teething issues before it was confident in its implementation, and most of these related to a misunderstanding of scale.

We are uploading the best part of a terabyte every single day to Egress

"It is a very significant business process change, and I think - this sounds silly, but nobody quite realised just how high the volumes were. So, you know, we are uploading the best part of a terabyte every single day to Egress, and therefore the extent of scaling - of both our network infrastructure and the Egress platform - that was required to support that in an efficient way is very substantial. The combination of those things - of the business process change and that need for scaling - meant that there were some bumps along the road in the initial implementation."

Gray's main point of advice for anyone seeking to implement a similar platform is "spend a lot more time doing the sizing up-front." CPS based its deployment on "what seemed like sensible assumptions," but these turned out to be overly conservative. For example, before deploying Egress CPS would immediately file any disks that came in. Stakeholders might only view them later, or possibly never at all if the case was dropped, which led to incorrect assumptions about the amount of data the Service works with on a daily basis.

"In the disk-free world, what happens is those cases come in and are immediately put onto Egress - so actually the demand on the technology platform is the whole, not just the bit that you end up using," Gray explains.

"I think that volumetric analysis was probably the biggest learning [point]... We're probably a unique use case in that sense, but for other organisations looking for something similar...[they have to] make sure they've done as much as possible to assess that, because then the IT infrastructure - both our side and Egress or equivalent's side - can be scaled accordingly."

Crown Prosecution Service declares 'war on disks' is almost over

The CPS has transformed the way it handles multimedia, to raise security and lower costs

Cutting disks cuts costs

Two years after the implementation, and CPS is seeing provable benefits - both direct and indirect - from moving away from physical media.

"We feel that the war on disks is emphatically being won," says Gray. "There's some minor skirmishes still going on, but effectively that war is won, and that's been a big lift for everyone in our organisation, not just for the technology team..."

"[Fewer disks] entails improved data security, improved and more consistent processes and reduced costs, probably in that order."

By getting rid of the disks as soon as media enters CPS, the organisation has drastically cut the number of couriers it needs to use. This reduces the risk of an accidental data breach, saves money and is good for the planet. The wider move to digital working has had a similar effect: CPS prints 150 million fewer sheets of paper a year today than it did three years ago.

Efficiency is a more difficult metric to track, but Gray believes it has also risen since adopting the Egress platform.

"In the pre-Egress world and the disk world, it would take, on average, a day for disk X to go from A to B. So if you take...maybe one move around the CPS and then a move outward afterwards, you are saving two or three days from the criminal justice process, which is in everybody's interest.

"Now, can I point to a number and say, ‘Look, it's gone down as a result of that'? No, because there's so many other variables, like the complexity of cases...but you can look at any individual case and say, 'Well, if we didn't have this tool, this would have taken longer for this stage to happen'."

Now that the technology is in place to support digital working at CPS, transforming the processes, like moving to digital-native forms instead of digital versions of the old paper-based ones, is the next step. 10 years after beginning its digital transformation, Gray is positive about CPS's future. "The next five years will be about the next wave of business transformation enabled by [the new] technology."