The VANTOS V-Flex Platform

The VANTOS V-Flex Platform is a portfolio of technology capabilities, core products, and best practice guidance designed to give an enterprise complete command and control of its investigations.

Problem: Investigation Complexity

Investigations vary with the types of incidents that occur, the investigators that conduct them, the information that needs to be collected, the policies that must be followed, and how the results should be presented. Even the simplest investigation involves many stakeholders and generates large amounts of data that need to be collected, analyzed and stored. New types of investigations continually arise due to new laws, threats, and changes in the business.

Efforts to use existing Enterprise Investigation Management tools to manage this complexity have fallen short. The lack of tools and procedures forces investigators to reinvent the wheel with each new incident, often using pen, paper, and spreadsheets to do their work. The inability to manage investigations in a repeatable, auditable, defensible and recoverable manner is now a crisis requiring immediate attention.

Solution: Flexible Platform
Dynamically Adapts to Changing Customer Needs

VANTOS developed the V-Flex platform and its core product, V-Flexim to address the complexity of managing enterprise investigations. The multidimensional nature of investigations exceeds the capabilities of a single application with standard database, forms, and production workflow features. A totally new approach is needed. The VANTOS V-Flex platform was built from the ground up to adapt to the evolving complexity, volume and variety of investigations.

The V-Flex platform allows complete customization of the investigation process, data representation and layout of information, providing these user-configurable features:

  • Data Modeling allows new data sets to be incorporated and analyzed by automating retrieval and storage of both structured and unstructured data.
  • Process Modeling supports changes in workflow, policy and automation needs. Investigative processes can be changed and extended by users depending upon their role. Even a swarm of processes can be incrementally added as required and still work cooperatively.
  • Presentation Modeling addresses new dashboard and reporting requirements. The model allows user-defined forms, workbenches, themes, and publishing templates to be changed during normal system operation.

Approachability Features Shape the User Experience

Additional steps have been taken to integrate presentation, data, and process features into normal operations associated with the individual roles of non-programmer, expert users. This is a user experience strategy we refer to as "approachability".

Our primary approachability feature for engaging expert investigators, for example, is the playbook. A playbook consists of the steps required to complete a specific type of investigation and the just-in-time team assignments associated with those steps. Playbooks allow expert investigators to codify these characteristics into a family of investigative strategies, and to evolve them to keep pace with their organization's needs.

As a result, tribal knowledge from each investigation is retained instead of lost, and this knowledge can easily be made available to all investigative teams. In this way, playbooks enable repeatability and time compression of new investigations.

Approachability is an ongoing, high priority project for the VANTOS platform development team. We plan to add new strategies and improvements to the V-Flex platform as VANTOS technology co-evolves in response to the needs of our customers.