The situation
The Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI) has long been a well-known forensic research center and provides key insights for criminal investigations. Over the past ten years, its in-house big data platform, Hansken, has grown from a small development team into a mature platform with dozens of developers. The platform integrated various applications, including PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, to process and analyze enormous amounts of forensic data. As the platform continued to expand, managing this complexity became increasingly challenging. The traditional infrastructure required the NFI to manually manage installations for each partner, which limited scalability and made it difficult to serve a growing number of stakeholders. Additionally, the preference for “ tailored solutions ” over standardized solutions led to inconsistencies and inefficiencies within the landscape.
Facts and figures
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Improved scalability with a modern infrastructure on Kubernetes
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Accelerated deployment and reduced downtime
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Lower operating costs through automation and more efficient management
The impact
The existing setup imposed significant operational constraints. NFI’s inability to efficiently scale the Hansken platform hindered its potential to serve a broader international clientele, including law enforcement agencies and forensic institutions. The manual installation processes consumed valuable time and resources, diverting attention from strategic initiatives and innovation. Moreover, the platform’s complexity made it challenging to implement updates or partial upgrades, often necessitating complete overhauls that disrupted ongoing operations. These challenges not only affected NFI’s operational efficiency but also its revenue streams, as the institute relied on partner contributions for both licensing and feature development.
The result
The Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI) recognized the need for transformation and launched a containerization project for the Hansken platform. By implementing containerization, the NFI sought to modularize the platform’s components, thereby significantly simplifying management and deployment. This approach made it possible to implement scalable and highly available solutions that dynamically allocate resources based on demand. The transition to a containerized infrastructure also simplified the setup of test environments and proof-of-concepts, which greatly reduced the time and effort required for deployments. In addition, this lowered the adoption barrier for potential partners, enabling the NFI to expand its services more effectively to international organizations. Despite the challenges posed by air-gapped environments and on-premises hardware requirements, the containerized platform enabled more efficient on-site deployments. This resulted in less downtime, better performance, and a future-proof foundation for further growth and collaboration.
To learn how SUE is modernizing a legacy application step by step, visit the page Application Modernization.
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