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Cloudy with a Chance of Collections

Dec 03, 2024

We get a lot of inquiries around F-Response Collect and cloud deployments. Can we use it in the cloud? Do you manage it? Talk to me about your data protection policies. Can we save images to a cloud storage service? What about (insert my favorite cloud provider here), will that work?

Photo by Marc PEZIN on Unsplash

Let's take a few minutes now to walk through these questions and try to dispel some of the confusion. F-Response Collect is a client server application offered by F-Response to solve the challenge of making remote forensic acquisitions over considerable distances and unstable networks. It is not Software-As-A-Service ("SAAS"). We don't manage the server. We don't have access to your data. We aren't connected to any of that. When you purchase F-Response Collect you are purchasing a license (1 or 3yr) that enables you to install the server on a single machine, physical or virtual.

What about my favorite cloud provider? F-Response Collect should work just fine. We've run it on Amazon EC2, Azure, and Google Compute, as well as the smaller VPS providers like Linode and Digital Ocean. F-Response Collect is available as both an RPM installation package for Linux and an installer for Microsoft Windows. As long as you are creating a server with one of those two operating systems, and in the case of linux, designed to handle that packaging system, you'll be fine.

What about the Images? Where can I store them? Does F-Response Collect talk to Azure Blob Storage or Amazon S3? For image collection, F-Response Collect will save the data to its local file system. It's going to look for a path and save the image data to that local path. Collect doesn't know anything about blob storage or buckets. It knows folder paths. We recommend, if you are using a cloud provider, that you use a disk that is native to the machine itself. This means building a virtual server with a secondary drive sufficient to store your images, or connecting a disk from something like Amazon S3's Elastic Block Storage ("EBS"). While we get asked a lot about Amazon S3's virtual drive, we have not seen it work consistently and do not support it for F-Response Collect.

So, to summarize:

  • You can install F-Response Collect on a server at your favorite cloud provider provided it is either Windows or RPM-based linux.

  • We do not have access to your data. We aren't a SAAS service. We aren't a data aggregator or processor. We sell packaged software for you to install, manage, and use.

  • You can use cloud storage as your destination provided the cloud server you have installed F-Response Collect on sees this storage as a physical disk.

Thanks!

Matt