Executive Summary
A UK communications solutions provider serving emergency services and public safety organisations needed to move body-worn camera footage onto AWS, but the customers consuming that footage (police, fire, ambulance, defence) treat it as legal evidence. Logicata delivered a High-Level Design for an AWS architecture that meets evidence-grade integrity, tamper-evident access controls, and tiered long-term retention, giving the customer a documented blueprint approved for the build phase.
Customer Overview
Sector: Telecommunications / Public Safety
Location: United Kingdom
The customer is a leading UK provider of two-way radio, body-worn cameras, TETRA systems, and other critical communications solutions. Their customers include emergency services, transport operators, energy companies, and government organisations. In those sectors, video footage is evidence, and evidence has rules: chain of custody, tamper-proof storage, auditable access.
The Challenge
Moving body camera footage to AWS without a clear design first would have been reckless:
- Evidence-grade storage requirements. Footage used in legal proceedings needs tamper-proof storage with strict chain-of-custody controls.
- No existing AWS footprint. This was greenfield. The architecture had to be optimised from day one for high-volume video ingest and long retention.
- Security sensitivity. Serving police, fire, ambulance, and defence sectors raises the bar on access controls and encryption.
- Cost at scale. Large volumes of video with multi-year retention demand cost-effective storage tiering, not flat hot storage.
- Compliance considerations. Public sector and criminal justice requirements around data sovereignty, access auditing, and evidence integrity all needed to be addressed in the design, not patched in later.
The Solution
Logicata delivered a High-Level Design (HLD) document covering the AWS infrastructure end to end:
What the HLD covers
- Compute, networking, storage tiering, security, and operational requirements for body camera video management, designed as a coherent whole rather than service by service
- Storage architecture for high-volume video ingest, with automated lifecycle policies moving content from hot to warm to cold tiers as retention windows shift
- Security architecture with encryption at rest and in transit, full access auditing, and tamper-evident controls aligned with criminal justice evidence-handling standards
- Availability and data integrity treatment specifically for evidential video, not generic web workloads
- Documentation suitable for customer review, internal approval, and direct handoff to the build team
Why the design choices matter
- S3 with lifecycle policies lets the customer keep recent footage in fast storage and move older content to Glacier without changing application logic or retention promises.
- KMS encryption and CloudTrail auditing give the chain-of-custody story a defensible technical foundation.
- VPC isolation and IAM controls ensure that only authorised processes can read or modify footage, with every access logged.
Results
- A comprehensive HLD delivered for customer review and approval
- An architecture sized for high-volume body camera ingest and long-term retention
- Security controls aligned with public sector and criminal justice evidence-handling expectations
- Cost-optimised storage tiering keeping multi-year retention affordable
- A clear implementation roadmap ready to hand to the build phase
- Customer confidence in AWS as a platform for evidential video storage workloads, backed by a documented design
AWS Services Used
- Amazon S3 (tiered storage with lifecycle policies)
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon VPC
- Amazon RDS
- Elastic Load Balancing
- AWS Certificate Manager
- Amazon Route 53
- AWS IAM
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS Backup
- AWS KMS
- AWS CloudTrail
About Logicata
Logicata is an AWS Advanced Partner holding the AWS Cloud Operations Management Competency, validated through an independent third-party audit. Logicata helps organisations build and operate secure, well-governed cloud platforms on AWS, enabling customers to reduce operational risk, meet assurance expectations, and scale with confidence.
