Last year Overtis announced a new Protective Marking feature to safeguard files that hold confidential information. The new feature was developed in response to requests from UK police forces to help them to comply with Management of Police Information guidance, published by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Protective Marking is the UK system of classifying documents according to the Government Protective Marking Schem (GPMS). GPMS identifies the level of impact or harm that would be caused if information was disclosed to other states or external parties. The system is used throughout central and local government and the Critical National Infrastructure, to ensure that sensitive information is safely handled, stored and transmitted.

Overtis Vigilancepro allows Police Officers and Staff to classify files, documents, spreadsheets and emails, according to the GPMS five levels, which are: “Protect, Restricted, Confidential, Secret and Top Secret”. Documents that contain information in the public domain are labelled “Not Protectively Marked”. The software also allows forces to add any of their own specific descriptors to safeguard data. Vigilancepro writes the appropriate classification into the metadata of the file. This can then be picked up by other security systems, such as email gateways, to enforce encryption of attachments, in line with policy.

The software allows whitelists to be created for different email classification levels, ensuring that emails marked as “Confidential” cannot be sent outside of the pnn.police.uk domain, for example. This prevents emails from being accidentally sent to recipients outside of the force if they are inadvertently added via the “auto-complete” function.

Where individual officers need to access or transmit information contrary to a force’s policy, to enable them to undertake a particular investigation, this can be permitted through dialogue boxes included in the software. Any activity that contravenes policy is added to the software’s audit trail. This tracks all access, changes and transfers of data, to demonstrate compliance with MoPI and the DPA.

Commenting on increased adoption of Vigilancepro by the UK police, Ed Macnair, CEO of Overtis said, “The Police have to gather a lot of information on citizens to enable them to do their jobs effectively. However, there is a growing recognition that stored information is only as safe as the people who access it and the Information Commissioner has criticised individual forces for privacy breaches. By implementing technology that sits between personnel and data and encourages best practice through a combination of education and enforcement, officers can get on with using and sharing information to help them to carry out their duties, without breaching privacy regulations”.