In 2003, Hubstream’s CEO John Hancock had a conversation with a Toronto cop that changed his life.
“We were sitting in a Tim Hortons across from police headquarters talking about his new team that had just been formed to go after criminals who were using the Internet to create communities and share images of child abuse. I learned that criminals were using the internet as effectively as Microsoft’s most cutting-edge consulting clients who were my day job, while the law enforcement agencies that were tasked with policing the new public spaces were hobbled by the geographic siloes that have always been the way we organized policing”.
Collaborate
Throughout the work that followed at Microsoft in the 2000’s and the creation of Hubstream in the 2010’s, this realization has guided the development of Hubstream’s software platform in every aspect. Much of the work we have done to help agencies triage, refer and collaborate across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries has been focused on the technical and security challenges of large-scale investigative workloads. This work applies equally to our private sector customers who also need to scale up their teams to work globally with a range of stakeholders and service providers to protect their organization’s employees and customers from crime.
The missing piece
But there has always been a missing piece. For investigative teams to work effectively, it’s not just about technology. It’s also about the practices and approaches that the teams use to conduct their investigations in a world where the criminals are always, always evolving their approaches. The best teams in the world in both government agencies and corporations don’t just adopt better technology - they also adapt their processes on an ongoing basis to stay one step ahead of the criminals that they are up against.
Now in the cloud
After many years of development, the new release of our software platform Hubstream ONE finally allows us to add the missing piece. The model-driven approach that our Customer Success team has successfully used with their intensive, hands-on solution development for enterprise customers has been re-imagined from the ground up to allow best practices to be captured as reusable templates that can be shared with others.
Sign-up to try Hubstream ONE now.The world’s leading investigative teams have so much to offer their communities about best practices and effective approaches in their domains, whether that is Cybercrime, Child Protection, Trust and Safety, Brand Protection or many more. Our Customer Success team is working with those teams to publish more and more of their approaches as templates that can be adopted quickly, deployed into other Hubstream ONE data hubs and rolled out to more teams.
“Dozens of teams have built new capabilities and refined their processes using Hubstream software. In the past, our Customer Success team and partners innovated independently with each customer. This led to silos of work and expertise even within the same work community. Hubstream ONE technology and processes let us more easily share these capabilities and enhance how all investigators analyze data, prioritize work and resolve issues.” said Paul Whitaker, VP of Customer and Partner Success at Hubstream.
Some of the templates are widely applicable and will be published in our public template repository, The Vault. Others are highly sensitive and will only be shared on a peer-to-peer basis between organizations and agencies that are working towards a common goal, using approaches inspired by open source groups. Whichever approach a community takes, they will be able to move faster as a group and collectively rally around the approaches that work best.
“Allowing investigators to work better together to defeat crime has been the North Star of our approach since our founding” said John Hancock. “I can’t wait to see how communities around specific crime types adopt this approach to sharing their best ideas with each other, in a way that would have seemed like an impossible dream in a Toronto coffee shop nearly two decades ago”.