All Grown Up: GRC Is The New Frontier

Guidance Software is located in Pasadena, California and is recognized as the worldwide industry leader in digital investigative solutions.  The EnCase platform is very well known to industry professionals and to some extent that is both a blessing and a curse.  Guidance Software has grown up and now provides a diversified set of products capturing digital evidence and breaking deeper into enterprise operations.   Some may be surprised as this once thought of detective’s tool is now ready for the board room.

Guidance Software holds its annual CEIC Conference and this year General Michael Hayden will keynote regarding emerging global cyber attack hotspots.  Hayden is a catch and this is not to be missed.  This is the annual May event that Guidance showcases each year and generally is very well received.

The last time I spoke to anyone from Guidance Jim Doyle was running their NYC Sales and consulting operations.  So last night I caught up with one of Guidance’s Sales Executives for the NYC region and we talked.  In this post I’ll  highlight just some of the conversation and how that simple, one off digital forensic product has expanded deep into the enterprise.  

GRC Ready....Are You?

The first place to start here is “EnCase” now featuring version 7.06 in Digital Forensics and available in four flavors Enterprise, Forensic, Portable and Tableau Forensic. Guidance provides powerful and comprehensive instruction and training for those breaking into the product line for the first time and great refresher for those looking back and wondering if they hit all the points.  On line, on-demand training via Adobe Connect is driving even greater saturation into the market place and providing easy and up to date product and web facing familiarity.  Getting to know V7 is a mouse click away for our forensic investigators and enterprise personnel.  Well done Guidance Software.

Wordle Capture

From my point of view I was looking for more information in how Guidance Software is breaking further into the enterprise.  I learned for instance investigators can reach out over the web and remotely capture information needed.  Acquiring data from disk or RAM, documents, images, e-mail, webmail, Internet artifacts, Web history and cache, HTML page reconstruction, RAIDS, workstations, servers and with V7: smartphones and tablets.  Our favorite forensic tool has indeed grown up to be a powerful forensic toolkit standing at the ready.  Something Guidance would label as complete Endpoint Visibility.  Well, not too many years ago that meant visiting every location and seizing computers and/or servers.  The remote capability is a real draw to the product line.

Perhaps one of the more unexpected areas Guidance Software has moved into is the Governance Risk and Compliance areas (GRC).  Frankly I just hadn’t put Guidance Software’s EnCase on my radar for GRC.  But with EnCase Enterprise edition your getting a very powerful software application with powerful automation tools.  The gold standard comes with a price that promises to make some a little queasy.  But the Enterprise Edition is going to let you see over the entire network and report on a wide variety of governance, risk and compliance issues.  For me this brought our dinner conversation last night full circle.  As we then dug into GRC and applications and tools provided by EnCase Enterprise combined with Adobe Connect lessons available right on the web this purchase could be viewed as answering some distressing questions left on the table after your last audit.  Check out Guidance Software and let me know if you find another similar product in the market place that comes close.