The world of digital forensics is in the midst of dramatic changes that will send current techniques, approaches, and technologies to the sidelines as new solutions are required to meet the analytical challenges resulting from massive amounts of electronic data being created and stored by organizations and individuals.

We are all familiar with the abundance of statistics discussing the growing amounts of digital information as well as the anecdotal stories that demonstrate current investigative techniques are being overrun with too much data. The forensic market is beginning to look to industries like national intelligence and bioinformatics that are using information discovery and high performance computing techniques to develop new approaches to analyze digital data.

Currently forensic professionals are challenged with educating decision makers on the too much data problem and helping management better articulate the digital future and build the business cases required to find, invent, and deploy new technologies. In this article I am going to discuss some big picture concepts that, hopefully, will help this process. In addition, I will introduce a new generation of server-based solutions that allow investigators to bring massive, data center computing capability into the field—solutions that could remarkably change the ability to get the job done.

In the forensic community everyone uses analogies to describe the business, probably the most favorite being, “forensics discovery is like finding a needle in a haystack.” My favorite analogy is a little different and comes from growing up on the north coast of California and spending most of my summer days at the beach playing in the sand. If you have ever lost a small object, like a ring, at the beach—well you get the point. So while writing this article a question came to my mind that I thought could help illustrate the challenges facing the forensic community “are there more grains of sand on earth than there are bytes of data?” What do you think? Here is one of the best answers I found:

"How many grains of sand are there in the world? You could start off by trying to guess how many grains of sand there are in a spoonful of sand. Use a magnifying glass to count how many grains fit in a small section. Then, count how many of those sections fit in your spoon. Multiply the two numbers together to get an estimate. Using this same principle, plus some additional information, mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand."