Athina Douzina, Author at CACI

Data analysis in a cyber security platform

Posted on: 15 July 2020

CACI Information Intelligence are working with the Government on a prototype cyber security platform to improve capability in the area of automated network defence.

The platform ingests messages from disparate sources, including mainstream cyber security sensors and several bespoke sensors that are unique to our customer, and analyse the resulting data so a corresponding action can be automated.

Before you can respond to a cyber threat you must first detect that threat in real time, with attackers aiming to subvert detection by any means necessary, sometimes ‘real time’ can mean data spread across days, months or years, depending on the value of the target.

Our ingest pipeline was designed with these factors in mind, developing a scalable solution using message queues and data stored in elastic search which allows us to receive a large amount of fine grained data from sensors. The data received into the system is characteristically small and noisy. The natural background noise on these networks can make it difficult to decipher a legitimate cyber-attack and sensors often only report small snippets of information. The first step is to normalise the data, extracting common features from the sensors data such as devices involved, files, URLs, timings and severity.

Once all data is normalised into a common model, we seek to understand more about it by passing it through an enrichment process. In an ideal world you would perform a high level of enrichment on every message, but this is computationally expensive – especially if it requires a 3rd party service such as a DNS lookup. We aim to perform a basic level of enrichment on every message, for example, by using internal databases we can geocode external IPs to their country. An asset library of all known devices within the system is a valuable resource, adding in device information, physical location and operational status. We can optionally use 3rd party enrichment or even query back into the network using tools like Osquery on an on-demand basis. This allows us to make decisions on how to enhance the dataset while balancing the load on the system and network.

Once the ingest process has finished enrichment, we have a large pool of data to analyse. To reduce the burden on the Cyber Analyst we make use of ML techniques. Using Recommendation Engines, we can look at the previous actions performed by the user for similar messages and make a suggestion on the correct response. If the confidence of the recommendation is high, then a response can be automated by the system, for example blocking an attacker’s access to the network.

Our UI is a key part of the application and allows for Cyber Analysts to browse the data within the system. They follow threads through the data, spotting patterns that could indicate the presence of an attacker. It’s important the UI can enable the user’s workflow of pivoting on the data and following these threads. We provide tools to group the data together to provide context. The system has built-in tasks to replicate these groups and present it to the user, should a similar pattern of events happen in the future. The sequence of events can be as important as the body of the events themselves, and our system’s UI accounts for this by enabling a timeline view.

Ultimately the automated data analysis and ML applied in this project means that the caseload of the Cyber Analyst is reduced, responses to cyber threats can be made at all hours of the day with significant levels of trust and can result in the fast, automatic removal of a malicious entity from an unmonitored network.

SurfaceNet: An Observational Data Platform Improved by Cloud

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Met Office are responsible for collecting and processing observation data, used to analyse the country’s weather and climate, at weather stations around the world and coast. The observations are valuable to several different consumers, from meteorologists forecasting the weather to climate scientists trying to predict global trends resulting from global warming.

Met Office have been looking to build a replacement observations platform that is more efficient and appropriate for their current needs. CACI have been working with Met Office for the last two years to deliver the next generation system: ‘SurfaceNet’, with the primary requirements being that it is cost effective and scalable.

Given Met Office’s ethos of adopting a ‘Cloud First’ approach, and its partnership with AWS, it was an obvious choice to build the system in AWS’ Cloud. The first important decision was to select what would be our main compute resource. The observation data would be arriving once a minute and, given this spiky arrival time, Lambda proved to be the most cost-effective solution, allowing us to only pay for small periods where compute was required. The platform processes several observations from roughly 400 stations every minute – equating to 15 billion observations per month – so any marginal improvements on compute cost would soon add up.

Choosing Lambda complemented our desire to have a largely serverless system to minimise maintenance costs, using other serverless AWS resources such as S3, Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB and SQS. This approach avoided the need to provision and manage servers and the associated costs involved with this. Serverless resources are highly available by design; Aurora Serverless mandates at least two Availability Zones that the database is deployed into, while DynamoDB and S3 resources have their data intrinsically spread over multiple data centres.

Most of the data ingest occurs by remote data loggers communicating via MQTT with the platform; AWS IoT Core was the ideal resource for managing this. Using API gateway, we developed a simple API on top of IoT Core allowing those administering the system to onboard new loggers, manage their certificates and monitor their statuses. The Simple Email Service (SES) allows ingestion of data from marine buoys and ships that transmit their data via Iridium Satellite. Both IoT Core and SES are fully managed by AWS, supplying an easy method of handling data from a range of protocols with minimal operational management.

From a development perspective, the stand-out benefit of working in the cloud has been having the ability to deploy fully representative environments to test against. Our infrastructure is defined using CloudFormation, enabling each developer to stand up their own copy of the system when adding a new feature. Eliminating the classic ‘works on my machine’ problems that plague local development allowed for rapid iteration cycles and far fewer bugs during testing. The process means constantly exercising the ability to deploy the system from scratch, which will come in handy when an unforeseen problem occurs in the future.

Whilst this suggests a flawless venture into the Cloud sector, the journey hasn’t been without problems. CloudFormation has been incredibly useful, but given the scale and the number of resources, it has become cumbersome. Despite our best mitigation efforts there is still a large amount of repetition, and the cumulative lines of YAML we have committed is on par with the number of lines of python. We would consider using the newer AWS CDK if we were to approach the project again. Additionally, we started off making new repositories for each new Lambda, but this has ended up limiting our ability to share code effectively across components, not to mention having to update ~40 repositories when we want to update buildspecs to use a new version of python.

It has been a fascinating couple of years and a main takeaway has been that large organisations such as Met Office, with large-scale bespoke data problems, see the cloud as a desired environment for building solutions. The maturity of the AWS platform has shown the cloud to be both robust and cheap enough to satisfy the requirements of complex systems, such as SurfaceNet, and will certainly play a big part in the future of both CACI and the Met Office.

IT Delivery Assurance – Is it needed now more than ever?

Posted on: 10 July 2020

With the economy now re-opening as lockdown measures are eased, there’s an acute awareness of a new normal – a heightened focus on what matters and a keener appetite to quickly disregard the things that don’t.

Increased remote working is likely here to stay so robust cyber security controls become even more important. Now, more than ever, businesses are keen to find out whether the platform they’re standing on was built from tinder wood.

To accelerate Britain’s digital maturation, the government has announced £10M funding to develop groundbreaking cyber security technologies. However, owning the tools is only a part of the solution – businesses are often in possession of good tooling but lack the skills to properly integrate, run and support these technologies. The same could be true of any kind of IT project and the failure rate of IT projects remains appalling.

The most common response to a history of failed projects is to increase project oversight, with a particular emphasis on reporting. However, more is often mistaken for better when it comes to governance.

In a Gartner study of failed IT projects, analysis revealed most complex projects had unrealistic goals, unproven teams and almost no accountability at all levels of the management and governance structure, meaning no one is responsible for failure.

What’s more, project failures led to low morale, often coupled with high attrition rates. In highly technical environments, the impact of this staff churn can dramatically affect project milestones.

This is why you should consider delivery assurance for your next major project.

To help ease this burden, we offer delivery assurance with all our technical services to ensure that the required outcomes are achieved.

We offer to take responsibility for the quality and timeliness of our consultants’ deliverables by:

· Recruiting a high standard of consultant

· Providing management supervision of consultants’ work

· Ensuring resource continuity and upscaling via a pool of consultants

· Overseeing quality of deliverables

· Checking customer satisfaction of our consultants’ work

This offers a range of key benefits for our clients:

· They can be confident that a programme will be delivered on time, to budget and with business benefits optimally realised.

· They have an independent advisor to mediate and resolve any disputes you may have with a 3rd party supplier

· Resourcing and delivery issues are taken away

· Reduced stress about anything going wrong because they know they are covered and it will be resolved at no further cost

CACI Network Services has successfully delivered for our clients at the largest enterprise scale. Speak to us to see if you’d like to know more about our delivery assurance offering and whether we could be a good fit for your organisation.

Serverless Cloud Security Principles

Posted on: 1 July 2020

Enterprise IT has evolved from on-premise, to renting space in datacentres, into the cloud and even more abstracted approaches like the current crop of serverless offerings. At CACI, we have worked with numerous customers to deliver serverless projects and each time the security considerations are always central to the design. Previous security practices and guidance have been focussed on the more traditional routes to enterprise IT, but does that guidance relate to serverless solutions?

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has always provided well considered and proven guidance on security practices. CACI have recently worked with them on a serverless project and used the opportunity to help review their 14 Cloud Security Principles.

So, how do they hold up?

One of the main benefits of moving to a cloud service is the delegation of responsibility for managing the physical infrastructure to a provider. All the cloud security principles that relate to the selection of that provider are still relevant and comprise of a very useful set of considerations. Those principles can be used a checklist of requirements that you should be looking for when you decide on a provider, if you look around, the main players in the market have already documented responses to the NCSCs guidance to make that easier.

A serverless solution to a problem typically has a few more moving parts than its monolithic counterparts and the some of the principles become more important as a result. Protecting your data in transit is a fundamental consideration for any project, but with greater amounts of communication between components in a serverless system, and the nature of the shared infrastructure these services are provided on, this becomes an ever more important concern. Measures such as ensuring connections to datastores, messages sent to queues and REST interfaces are all secured using TLS with a robust key policy go a long way to answering this concern, and many of the services provided by the major players come with these safeguards built in.

The principle concerning secure development practices are still very relevant and the adoption of a new style of architecting solutions with serverless components brings its own challenges. If your team do not have a good understanding of the provider’s services and the constraints that may be applied to them, for example some serverless versions of services only support certain versions of software, it is easy to leave routes open to malicious actors. Each of the major providers have partner programs where there are companies that offer a range of services from the traditional penetration test to a full architectural review of your solution. It is worth considering if the use of these external services is appropriate to you.

Ultimately, the last principle in the list is still one of the most important messages. You are responsible for the proper use of the tools you opt to use from the provider. If you don’t fully understand what each service does, the constraints around its use and the best practices for that use, you run the risk of undermining whatever protection your provider has built into the service and exposing your solution to attack from malicious or misinformed use. Some of the simplest mistakes have led to massive breaches of data, accidently checking the box to make an S3 bucket public allows anybody to download the data and numerous high-profile companies have lost control of their data this way.

The use of cloud services in general, and serverless options in particular, give you an almost unlimited opportunity to scale your solutions to solve problems at a massive scale but remember – you pay for what you use. Including some good service monitoring into your solution, and a basic understanding of the pricing models of your chosen provider, should give you the peace of mind to fully utilise the power and flexibility of the serverless architecture.

Why it’s time for Telecoms to prioritise Master Data Management

Posted on: 2 June 2020

The year of 2020 has brought with it many challenges, not least of which is the need to stay connected. The recent reliance on digital services to keep families, friends and businesses in touch is an added pressure and opportunity for the Telco industry who are already taking on the challenges presented by the Internet of Things (IoT) and the roll out of 5G.

Along with these new challenges and opportunities comes a time for these companies to ensure one thing moves up in the list of priorities: Master Data Management (MDM).

A MDM solution not only brings systems and information together, but creates a single version of the truth. An accurate and trusted, complete view across customers, operations, supply chain, governance and more.

Here we look at some of the key uses and benefits telecoms can get from MDM.

The customer is king

It may seem obvious that we would list the importance of the customer and their data to any telco company, but what is often less obvious is just how complex customer data can get; and that without a full view of the customer, new opportunities can be easily missed and the chances of them jumping ship are substantially increased.

When we start to delve into the sources and various data held by just one customer, it can span across subscriptions, family members, tariffs, bolt-ons, bundles and more. If this information isn’t properly stored and managed, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) can quite easily make big missteps that make the customer immediately think “you don’t know me” – which in the world of tailored online marketing, creates negative brand associates overnight.

While customers might not say it out loud, the expectation is that their CSP has a complete 360-degree view of them, across from their accounts, their relationships, their history with the CSP, interactions (whether that’s by phone, email, in-store or social media) and more. Plus, to really stay on top of future opportunities the CSP also needs to be looking at the customer’s network usage and behaviours. By taking this 360-degree approach the CSP is far more likely to create the right offer at the right time, reduce customer churn and even increase products bought within their existing customer base.

Considering these facts and that it is widely accepted that customer retention and relationship building provides more potential revenue than the acquisition of a new customer, CSPs must prioritise implementation of solutions such as MDM that allow them to better understand and react to their customers and access this potential revenue.

Protecting and producing products

Managing the chain of suppliers and products is not as straightforward as it may sound, especially where CSPs are concerned. Between the contract products of various tariffs, the digital subscriptions such as video and channel content and the hardware of different suppliers, “product” suddenly sounds much bigger.

Across these products, information is stored, managed and presented in different (and sometimes multiple) ways, creating a complicated task, especially if it’s being done manually. This will often be done by various people across the business, working in different departments.

What MDM solves for products is a way to centralise all of this information, turning large volumes of data into a manageable data set that helps a CSP to better manage all of their processes.

Opening up new revenue streams

As some more traditional revenue streams dry out, the pressure is on CSPs to look to other areas of their ecosystem for opportunities and new revenue streams.

One of these opportunities may come from the growth of connected devices and the IoT. As more and more consumers connect their home appliances, CSPs can gain increased data insights from larger volumes of data than ever before.

In addition to this, as we meet the new reality of 5G rollouts, previously unthinkable volumes of data will soon become the norm. This could not only help telecoms improve efficiency, but also open up a new stream of revenue by taking a network slicing approach to enhance network monetisation.

Once telecom’s begin to go down this route the importance of MDM becomes apparent very quickly as the data volumes need to be effectively managed.

The future of MDM for CSPs

To keep the competitive edge and meet customer demands, implementation of a MDM solution is becoming increasingly crucial.

CSPs have historically invested in key systems to support these goals such as CRM, ERP and Network management systems. With those in place a solid MDM solution provides the boost the CSP environment needs to drive improvements, efficiencies and ultimately business growth.

Find out more about how CACI are supporting telco companies in master data management.

Informing SEND provision

Posted on: 21 May 2020

It is easy to understand the view that putting all the educational, social and emotional support requirements of children into one check out process should be the focus of a SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) technology solution. The efficacy of this, however, should be questioned.

The SEND journey involves bringing together our burgeoning understanding of effective responses to overlapping complex needs in a specific local service context. So many children and young people cross professional service boundaries where SEND support is required. It is, therefore, paramount that disparate services are enabled to collaborate and draw on and challenge one another’s thinking to build learning and effective practice.

As things stand, individuals understand aspects of SEND and parts of a service response, but this can be insufficient to build a whole system response. A child’s presenting problems can require sound professional judgement about hidden and buried issues but these skills are in short supply. This is where we can see the pros and cons of building a rational data process infrastructure at this time to address the service problem – if you build a process solution in silos, this can shunt problems, undermine relevant perspectives, block new understandings and practice learnings that make a difference.

You can make the siloed processes more joined up and efficient and in the short term less costly, but this can result in high service costs over the longer term where the whole system is not geared to manage demand. Multi-agency collaboration and learning will be compromised and the ability to create insight and innovative responses to need in the locality will be hampered.

A backdrop to the development and understanding of SEND provisions has been the challenge and inconsistencies of cuts to public services. These have created uneven systems, recruitment and morale difficulties through the teams in this area. How can this be reconciled? How can the practitioner systems and services build capability and be aligned?

As we can see in the Richmond case (about which you can read more here), the leaders can be a long way from the coal face, often not being in a position to understand or realise the issues until the problems are identified by a case review. In this case, it wasn’t until complaints were brought against the council. The investigation revealed the points of failure from the record keeping of parents – only then could we fully comprehend what had happened in an individual case. This serves to highlight the lack of consistency and coherence that can exist in current process and practice.

This is an issue which goes beyond SEND, too. We are seeing similar issues of cooperation and coherence in situations concerning County Lines operations and efforts to thwart them. A collective multi-agency approach is crucial to these efforts, but as we are seeing, young people who are brought to the attention of the authorities are being passed from one agency to another, often with minimal interaction between those agencies.

Some of the software which these agencies are using has also conditioned practitioners to do a job, rather than their job. To a certain extent, some points of interaction and some points of the service have become box ticking exercises. An unintended consequence is that the systems do not promote consistent and reliable professionalism as fragments of information with different provenance are passed around.

It is imperative, in building effective SEND provision, that practitioners and managers have well formed, clear and relevant information at the right level on each child in the context of their developmental journey. Providing each decision-making group with timely information alongside feedback about choices and outcomes helps them greatly in their very challenging job.

Poor decisions will be made under pressure where factors precipitate risk – knowledgeable practitioners having access to reliable up-to-the-minute information relieves the pressure and helps to correct or eliminate mistakes.

Technology, systems and software are not, however, a silver bullet to the issues we have seen with Richmond. The organisation system is vulnerable to human and systemic error and is difficult to maintain good decision making for complex needs at the right organisational level.

We can collate data in systems, however, we rely on professionals to create information and turn this into knowledge to take appropriate action across multiple agencies and professional groups. This is achieved where parents/carers and professionals interact with each other, create and access information in quality sources, but this can only be achieved with a common vision of what that looks like.

It is evident at the moment that parent/carers and practitioners involved in disparate services do not have un-refracted information relevant to supporting the journeys for many children.

There are 1,318,300 SEND children in education in the UK and the identified cohort is rising year on year. That represents 14.9% of all children in the UK. Creating solutions across the whole system for this significant cohort of children is vital, and joining the practice learning, information and knowledge dots is the only way that we can achieve this.

Technology, social services and SEND provision – empowering exceptional service delivery

Posted on: 30 March 2020

It is evident at the moment that parent/carers and practitioners involved in disparate services do not have un-refracted information relevant to supporting the journeys for many children.

There are 1,318,300 SEND children in education in the UK and the identified cohort is rising year on year. That represents 14.9% of all children in the UK. Creating solutions across the whole system for this significant cohort of children is vital, and joining the practice learning, information and knowledge dots is the only way that we can achieve this.

Youth justice in 2020 – adopting a multi-agency approach

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Multi-agency collaboration has been a key theme of youth services’ approach to tackling serious youth violence and key issues such as county lines drug dealing operations over the past year. In the face of continuing budget cuts, reducing resources and dwindling police numbers, it is increasingly important that those operating in the fields around these social issues adopt an aligned approach in order to better understand and deal with the issues they are facing.

Temi Mwale from 4FrontProject opened December’s Youth Justice Convention with a sobering statistic: 186 young people aged under 19 from London alone have died in the last decade as a result of serious youth violence. The numbers don’t make for much reading across the rest of the UK, either.

Collaboration and cooperation

The 2019 Youth Justice Convention was an opportunity for the domain to focus on the trauma, fear and anxiety that youth violence causes, as well as the role that youth justice teams can play in adopting a multi-agency collaboration to shape and deliver effective responses and prevention.

The speakers and breakout sessions articulated strong themes about co-production, communication and engagement with young people at source. Presenters espoused the need for those involved to be trauma-aware and to work better with the available evidence and information to improve prevention and early intervention. Further insight was also offered into adolescent contextual safeguarding, research into the effects of social media and wider developments regarding trauma-informed practice developments.

This expanded upon the general themes that we saw throughout 2019. A few months ago, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) addressed the issue of serious youth violence, discussing similar approaches in its paper, A discussion paper on serious youth violence and knife crime by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services.

The key messaging has centred on the need for a multi-agency approach to discover new thinking and energy as regards tackling the issue of serious youth violence. There are no easy or quick fixes available, so collaboration is hugely important, a theme that was backed up across the sessions at the Youth Justice Convention.

The lack of strategic coordination at present is resulting in missed opportunities, huge inefficiencies in approach and in some cases, duplication of work across agencies.

Delivering a multi-agency approach

So, discussing multi-agency collaboration and cooperation is one thing, but how can this be delivered? Each agency involved in this sensitive area has its own work to conduct, from social workers and youth justice practitioners to the police force and those charities which aim to help, rehabilitate and prevent these issues. Taking a step back and working to fit into a bigger picture isn’t always easy.

Technology is going to play an increasingly prevalent role in the battle against these social issues. The software is available today which empowers agencies to complete their own work whilst also making it available to external agencies in order to better inform them of the important details of a young person’s journey.

If practitioners can compile data-rich life journey representations and experiences of the young people under their purview, the software is available to provide leaders with better information and analysis to inform multi-agency decision making. The principle is to use the available information and tools to easily generate improved tracking of service investments and evidence of effective practice and targeting prevention.

Each agency has so much valuable information and so many vital insights into the issues around youth violence. Opening these up to one another has been a theme of 2019 and can be a reality of 2020.

For more information on the technology that can be used to compile and share information on youth violence, please click below.

Early intervention in the county lines battle

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The issue of eliminating county lines drug operations has been perplexing police and local authority service partnerships for years now, as the criminal gangs responsible for them have evolved their enterprises to avoid detection by law enforcement. This shift in drug dealing methodology has seen criminals coercing younger and younger perpetrators to operate at the sharp end of the trade, trafficking and selling drugs up and down the country on their behalf.

The subject was covered in Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, Britain’s Child Drug Runners. The programme investigates the devastating impact county lines has on the young people involved and their families. If it’s a subject that interests and concerns you, the programme is well worth a watch.

In the programme, it says that 14-17-year olds are the most vulnerable to exploitation and that the Children’s Commissioner estimates that some 50,000 children are being exploited in county lines activities and this has been evidenced from data captured in local youth offending systems such as ChildView. Perhaps not on an entirely unrelated topic, it is also noted by the National Children’s Bureau that 49,187 children were missing education in 2016/17.

So, how can we, as a society and through our services, tackle this issue which is occurring in every town across the country? The documentary draws a familiar conclusion: early intervention.

Early intervention, largely agreed on as the panacea for county lines, is easier said than achieved. How can schools, local authorities, youth services, youth justice teams and the police align and move to recover the lives and futures of these exploited children?

Awareness will play a major role in the battle against county lines. As noted in Channel 4’s documentary by the pressured Thames Valley police, county lines are happening right under the noses of the rest of the population, down back alleys and in the homes of vulnerable drug addicts. Documentaries such as this are vital to helping people understand what is actually going on – and it’s going on everywhere.

Fortunately, experienced leaders governing multi-agency services such as Multi Agency Safeguarding Hubs (MASH) and Youth Offending Services, have shown how to build and sustain effective responses, particularly where statutory partnerships align around child-first policy, insights and information from practice systems and outcomes.

Children are falling into county lines operations as a result of being seduced by a lifestyle consisting of money, clothes, cars and respect. It offers them an identity they are otherwise struggling to find and the promise of easy money. If something looks too good to be true, however, it probably is.

Impressionable and vulnerable children, often although not exclusively from deprived backgrounds, see drug dealing as the way to make something of their lives. They get drawn in, coerced into running drug lines on behalf of their new friends and set across the country to pedal their wares out of trap houses, often living in squalor and fear of getting robbed. A glamorous and lucrative lifestyle this is not – and getting out can be all but impossible.

So, we’re back at early intervention. As one mother of a boy who was exploited says during the documentary, at first she viewed her son as a victim, then latterly as a perpetrator. The point at which these children can be helped is in those early stages. Of course, they remain as victims throughout, but getting to them before they believe they can’t back away and start recruiting other youngsters into the process is vital in turning the tide in the battle against county lines.

This is where data mapping and deeper enquiry can play such an important role. Schools, police and local children’s authorities all have observations and data on these children which can be brought into sharper focus and visualised. As we see in the documentary when one girl is arrested, the police have information on her which informs their strategy to best deal with her immediate situation. She’s known to them. The problem is, she’s already submerged in the world of drug dealing, so it’s impossible for the police and children’s services to effectively deal with her situation given the small window of time and priority that they have.

We can, however, build and use the links and insights better. Is school progress and attendance illustrating a pattern? Who knows about the young person’s peer group and family? Have the police or others been reacting to incidents? All these factors and our understanding of adolescent vulnerability can be linked and made transparent to be used for honing early intervention efforts. We can start to join the engagement dots. We can use practice-based evidence to identify the journey that exploited young people have been on to find and make sense of commonality, missed opportunities and protective factors. We can look beneath the surface.

Technology alone isn’t the silver bullet to this growing crisis. It will take insight, innovative and exceptional human effort to recover the lives concerned. Combining rich data and understanding to inform service leaders where to focus efforts across a complex system of influences will drive learning and efficiency in early intervention and optimise the limited multi agency resources available. Otherwise, as we have seen, by the time we react to escalating incidents, it can already be too late.

For more information on how our experience with technology and design can help to improve the lives of vulnerable young people, please click below.

The benefits of fully managed hosting for youth offending teams

Posted on: 27 March 2020

Storing, maintaining and securing data can be expensive and inflexible if you choose to host it onsite. This is why we’re seeing a number of youth offending teams moving away from onsite hosting and opting for outsourced fully managed hosting off premise. Besides efficiencies of cost and effort, outsourcing is enabling teams to be fully compliant and secure.

Moving your data to the cloud brings about numerous benefits for youth offending services. From a commercial standpoint, it means that youth offending teams can switch the expense of hosting from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure, freeing up vital funds for improving outcomes for young people in your care.

From a security standpoint, it makes managing data a lot easier, too. By leveraging the spend of larger hosting specialists, you are in a stronger position to secure your data. For example, Microsoft spends in excess of $1bn every year on security, which most firms leverage through use of Microsoft applications. That sort of budget simply isn’t available to youth offending teams, so it makes sense to leverage the spend of larger operators.

Security patching is another element of hosting that a fully managed solution can relieve you of. The threat of your data being breached is an evolving one which requires near constant updates to your framework. Again, by leveraging the spend of a specialist solution your security is constantly being updated. At CACI, we run regular stress and penetration tests internally and via external agencies to keep us one step ahead of the game, keeping ours and our clients’ data secure. This is one of the reasons that we are trusted to deliver to highly secure government and local government hosting solutions, many of which use our G-Cloud 10 hosting solution which is available to youth services.

This provides peace of mind that your data is safe. It also provides you with flexible access to it. If, for example, a disaster scenario occurs and your onsite solution gets damaged, how will you recover the data? A fully managed hosting solution will have you back up and running in no time. It’s also useful, during times such as a global pandemic when staff are likely to be based away from the office, for there to be a single access point which enables your service to keep running by maintaining the provision of requisite data to your team.

Such flexibility also extends through your operations. Where you need to integrate your data with third party applications, you can simply plug it in and go. For example, if you’re looking to utilise or expand your use of mobile portals or apps, you can run your data through these easily. This will help to support future initiatives of joined-up, multi-agency approaches to youth justice. All this means that you can continue to adapt and evolve your services, empowering you to provide the best possible service and outcomes on the front line.

If you’re considering moving to a fully managed hosting solution, or you would like more information on CACI’s fully managed hosting solution for youth offending teams, visit our ChildView page.