Beyond Software: Why Forensic Analytics as a Service is Transforming UK Policing

UK policing is at an inflection point. The scale, complexity, and evidential importance of digital data have grown exponentially, yet the traditional procurement and deployment models for digital forensic tools have not kept pace. UK policing is under sustained budget pressures, struggling with skills shortages, attrition and facing increasing regulatory scrutiny. Today’s society has also become increasingly polarised, and trust eroded in government institutions.

Fault lines and fragmentation aren’t just a macro-societal issue; they are mirrored within the microenvironment of policing. Today’s policing landscape is inherently fragmented. With 43 territorial police forces across England and Wales alongside regional and national units, the reality is they suffer from:

• Inconsistent tooling and capability across forces.

• Duplication of infrastructure and therefore increased total cost of ownership.

• Skills concentrated in specialist teams rather than embedded across the organisation.

• Growing backlogs due to increasing volumes of digital evidence.

For these and many other reasons, the government has stated its intent to reform policing in the UK, with the intention to merge forces, create a National Police Service, overhaul governance and invest in performance and technology. This reform programme is expected to take several years to deliver.

Meanwhile, all crimes now contain a digital element, significantly increasing investigative complexity and demand for advanced analytics. The net effect is a system where the demand for insight far outstrips the capacity of many environments attempting to serve tools, techniques, procedures and people to deliver it.

Against this backdrop, the emergence of Forensic Analytics as a Service (FAaaS) represents a fundamental shift not just in how technology is bought, but in how investigative capability is built, scaled, and sustained across forces. With FAaaS, you’re not buying software, you are working with a long term investigative capability partner who is both deploying tools, and up skilling your entire organisation to use them. It provides long term investigative capacity that empowers every user, from frontline officers to strategic leaders with the insight they need to act with evidential confidence.

From Tools to Capability

Many software businesses focus on access: how many licences, how many users, how many modules. Forensic Analytics as a Service fundamentally reframes this conversation by shifting from access to capability. FAaaS combines market leading digital analysis software, world class customer success management, expert training, professional services and accreditation into a single, outcome-oriented enterprise offering. For one price. FAaaS provides operational resilience, compliance and scale by design.

This is crucial because policing does not need more tools adding complexity. Forces demand:

• Faster investigations. Many vendors promise productivity; we remove entire stages of manual investigation work.

• Reduced risk in evidential handling. By parsing and connecting data we take you from raw data to operational outcomes and safeguarding decisions via an end to end investigative workflow.

• Scalable, consistent operational performance. True data and analysis democratisation. We don’t just give access to data; we give every officer and analyst the ability to act on it confidently.

Under FAaaS, forces are no longer buying isolated components, or one stop shop software monoliths. You are investing in a guaranteed, end to end investigative capability delivering the appropriate tools and skills to the right users, at the right time.

Enterprise Software Licensing and Services Platform: Unlocking Organisational Scale 

It’s the commercial backbone that enables this shift. Unlike traditional per seat models or ratio driven concurrency, enterprise agreements:

• Anchor pricing to organisational size and usage providing predictable, multi year cost models.

• Enable broad access to across frontline, analysts, and specialist teams.

• Simplify procurement and contract management.

FAaaS is an enterprise model that can operate effectively at organisational, regional, and national scale. Individual licences and piecemeal service agreements cannot. This is critical for UK policing because the challenge is not simply resource availability, it is resource distribution and accessibility. FAaaS allows forces to:

• Remove artificial constraints on access to capability.

• Deploy analytics beyond digital forensics into frontline policing.

• Support for the entire force, not vendor pressed “land and expand” growth across operational units.

In practical terms, this means moving from a world where capability is gated, cost prohibitive and specialist, to one where it is democratised across the force.

Enabling Workforce Upskilling at Pace

A key differentiator of the Forensic Analytics model is the integration of Training, Support and Customer Success; effectively capability development, into the core offering. It is central to the value proposition.

Forensic Analytics as a Service includes 24/7 UK vetted support, dedicated Customer Success Management and structured Training programmes aligned to an annual training profiles covering user groups, delegate volumes, and course requirements. The impact is profound:

• Thousands of officers and analysts can be trained consistently.

• Investigative skills are embedded across the organisation.

• Dependence on small specialist teams is reduced.

• Competence and compliance (e.g. FSR, ISO standards) are maintained.

Critically, software vendors often provide software without formal training or partnerships. In contrast, Forensic Analytics couples technology with accredited training, ongoing support and domain expert professional services, ensuring forces realise the value of the tools they deploy. This is the difference between tool adoption and capability transformation, raising the digital IQ of organisations.

Reducing Risk, Increasing Outcomes 

Another critical differentiator lies in risk management. FAaaS delivers structured professional services such as expert witness practises, defined service levels and entitlements, integrated compliance support (e.g. FSR Code of Practice, ISO accreditation) and dedicated customer success. This reduces operational and compliance risk as well as reducing financial uncertainty by ensuring forces are not exposed to concealed extra operational expenditure or added subscription costs of ‘bolt-on’ features. One cost. No hidden fees.

Finally, the cost of rebuilding capability can take years and millions of pounds to recover, whereas the cost of changing software is far lower. By partnering with Forensic Analytics, we embed capability within a managed service, so forces gain continuity and best practice approaches and tools, assurance and safety in their application and predictable outcomes. FAaaS delivers full force investigative capabilities at the cost of a comparative software license estate.

From Vendor to Capability Partner

UK policing is moving towards greater regionalisation, shared services, and national consistency. FAaaS and its enterprise model directly support this trajectory. From a structural perspective FAaaS aligns with the push towards national data standards and interoperability through POLE standards and Open API’s, enabling shared capability across forces and regions with support, training and accredited standards. Finally, FAaaS will reduce duplication of infrastructure and investment not just within ICT but with techniques and procedures that are critical for efficient and desirable investigative outcomes.

From an operational perspective this means forces can collaborate more effectively using common tooling and methodologies, regional units (e.g. ROCUs) can operate on shared datasets and platforms, and national-level capabilities can be delivered without replacing local autonomy.

The FAaaS model also aligns with environmental and economic pressures to reduce inefficiency and duplication, instead favouring a scalable shared service platform. In effect, FAaaS provides the technical and commercial foundation for a more integrated UK policing landscape. Ultimately the most important shift is not technical or commercial, it is relational. The FAaaS model positions Forensic Analytics not as a software supplier, but as your long-term investigative capability partner. This will be evidenced by FAaaS delivering:

• Outcome based commercial models tied to real operational impact.

• Continuous training and skill development across the workforce.

• Integrated and embedded support, customer success and professional services.

• Alignment to national policing priorities and standards.

For forces, this means you are not simply purchasing a product. You are building a sustained, scalable investigative capability with Forensic Analytics. This evolves over time alongside threats, data complexity, and policing priorities. Forensic Analytics as a Service is not an incremental improvement or wrapper on existing products and services. It’s a market defining differentiator, enabling UK policing to:

• Scale capability across all 43 forces in England and Wales

• Embed investigative skills across the entire workforce.

• Align to national reform and consolidation agendas.

• Reduce risk while improving outcomes.

• Move from fragmented tools and the promise of a single dashboard, cost prohibiting product to integrated, intelligence and evidence led operations.

In a world where digital evidence underpins every investigation, the question is no longer whether forces need advanced analytics and services to safely exploit them. The question is how they acquire, sustain, and scale that capability.

FAaaS provides the answer.

Luke Morgan,  

Deputy Chief Executive Officer.