Dr. James Kent: Disrupting the Industry with Most Innovative Solutions

Top 5 Empowering Consultants in Year 2023

Dr. James Kent rose to prominence despite a never-ending learning curve during his time in public service thanks to an exciting career as a detective that deviated toward digital forensics and cyber security.

Whenever an open door struck to reward the Examination and Security people group, James Kent bounced on it and helped to establish Dark Rainbow. Black Rainbow was founded in 2017 with the sole strategic goal of providing organizations with proactive and reactive investigations and operations with a cutting-edge and innovative solution for software that simplifies complex investigations and increases efficiency.

We caught up with James to talk about his exciting career, how his role as CEO of Black Rainbow addresses a number of challenges that have evolved over time, and how digital security looks in the future.

The interview’s highlights are as follows:

James, could you please tell our audience about your rise to prominence as a business leader and your tenure at Black Rainbow? Which obstacles have you overcome to get to where you are now?

My journey has been varied and interesting. After beginning my career as an engineer, I followed my true calling and worked as a police detective. In 1999, the police decided that each force area should have a high-tech crime unit that deals with the new field of digital forensics and cyber security. This was a turning point in my life. This was quite a departure from rape, burglary, and murder at the time, and it came with a steep learning curve as well; Nevertheless, it ended up being the best thing I had ever done.

My next journey was made possible by the years of learning and applying investigation skills with an edge of technical understanding. I made the decision to leave the police force and establish a cyber security, incident response, and digital forensics consulting and training business that serves all government and law enforcement agencies. We quickly became experts in hacking, security, and incident response, advising national and state agencies. This was somewhat brief as a worldwide counselling firm bought the business. I then, at that point, joined a Security and Examination Programming organization as the President of Europe, the Center East, and Africa situated in London.

After a few years, I relocated to Virginia as CEO of North America to expand the American market because of the company’s exceptional growth. Indeed, constantly adjusting and learning new difficulties, new innovations, and new clients while shuffling the scale and topography of the North American market for Examinations, Computerized Crime scene investigation, and Security.

A few years after the fact, in the wake of laying out the European and North American organizations, I wound up getting back to London as a worldwide Examinations and Security advocate venturing to every part of the globe, visiting clients, and following the talking circuit until at long last choosing to take a secondary lounge and resign nimbly and focus on my other energy of exemplary vehicle reclamation and family. A few years later, the company floated on the stock exchange with a valuation of more than $1 billion.

Since my friend called to inquire about your activities, my retirement plans were put on hold. Do you want to try something different? The baby was Black Rainbow. The goal was to build software that would simplify complicated investigations and increase efficiency while also giving something back to the Investigation and Security community.

Give us more information about your business, including its purpose and vision.

Our central goal is to diminish the examination lifecycle through knowledge, proficiency, and trustworthiness. With our NIMBUS solution, we have transformed the management of intelligence, investigations, and evidence eliminating inefficiencies and reducing risks for the intelligence, government, and law enforcement sectors.

The first integrated investigation case and quality management system available to the intelligence and investigation market is our NIMBUS solution. Our clients describe NIMBUS as revolutionary.

Law enforcement and government agencies are our ancestors; nonetheless, we have consistently changed Glow into the corporate and monetary area essentially in light of the fact that the framework is architected to deliver the market section immaterial as the issue is comparable across business sectors, geologies and clients.

Please explain to us how your market expertise has impacted the computer security sector.

By providing a flexible and configurable solution that can evolve and adapt to new challenges, we are simplifying the management of investigations that were previously in place. Investigation management requirements are no longer met by siloed systems, unsupported open source, or spreadsheets. The NIMBUS suite gives you complete control over and visibility into the investigation lifecycle. It also supports defensible evidence tracking, task management, and reporting, all of which are supported by adhering to the most recent quality standards and procedures.

The NIMBUS suite gives all stakeholders a centralized place to work, making it easier for investigation teams to create and manage all kinds of investigations within the organization.

By combining the four essential primary phases of any investigation, NIMBUS now serves as the digital room assistant, enabling investigators to accelerate investigations.

COLLECTION: Information, data, and evidence from multiple sources—human and digital—can be collected remotely using mobile devices and sent to the core application through a portal. Chain of custody and controlled exhibit handling for continuity, which drives efficiency and integrity from the outset.

PRODUCTIVITY: being able to use the data to create information that can be used. Make decision logs digital and display them in dashboards that show the decisions made. Action trees are used to show the shortest path between crucial events in live activity visualizations, providing a comprehensive audit history of what happened, when, and by whom.

ANALYTICS: Build your canvas graphs and visualize the case to reveal hidden connections and sequential events in timeline views, enabling you to visually tell the story.

REPORTING: auto-populates case information into statements and reports without the need to double-key, preventing errors, and reduces the burden of reporting and disclosure management beginning with the initial data entry, saving time. An electronic case file can be sent and viewed on mobile devices, enabling paperless court reports, investigations, and feedback.

NIMBUS has a lot of features, and every piece of information is recorded in a coordinated way, making it easier for investigators to see the big picture and make better decisions with a useful and easy-to-prove audit trail. It’s called “The Investigation Platform.”

Give a detailed description of your company’s core values and work environment.

Respect, Innovation, Transparency, and Constant Improvement drive the company culture:

Respect for yourself, your co-workers, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders.

Work toward becoming more productive, sharing ideas, and driving innovation throughout Black Rainbow, aiming for efficiency, effectiveness, and maintaining a competitive advantage.

Straightforwardness in telling the truth in areas of correspondence with partners and clients to fabricate trust and construct the development of a fruitful business.

Continuous improvement of our software product, its delivery, and our business procedures as we adapt to our expanding business’s requirements.

We at Black Rainbow are all motivated by the possibility of being a part of a team with a goal and a mission.

Technology is unquestionably important in almost every industry. How are you making use of advancements in technology to make your solutions useful?

Physical and digital data must efficiently enter the investigation/operations command’s central source as investigations become more complex and time-sensitive. Radiance retains this data quickly to comprehend and fabricate a visual grouping of occasions. Historically, it has been difficult to gather and transform this data into useful, relevant information for presentation as potential evidence. NIMBUS is intended to maintain investigation integrity and disclosure rules while streamlining this process, minimizing data duplication, and optimizing decision-making.

Our company’s NIMBUS solution is what makes it strong and ensures that it will continue to withstand technological change and digital challenges. The days of hosting software on-premise are slowly coming to an end, and AI technology and the cloud are being used together. We were aware of this change and planned ahead when creating the NIMBUS architecture. Because of this, we are ahead of many of our competitors in the market.

We have likewise assembled adaptable programming. Our clients can manage the user interface after it has been deployed by making changes that are configurable. This lets them change how they work now and in the future. Our end users benefit greatly from this because they do not have to wait or pay additional fees, which is another feature that sets us apart from other software on the market.

What do you think could be the next significant development in the field of computer security? How is your business preparing to participate in that shift?

Data quality management in the intelligence or investigations fields. In the end, this boils down to the procedures followed and their compliance with laws and regulations. Who is in charge of the activities, and do they possess the necessary skills and training? What kind of equipment is used, and has it been proven and tested? Different laws and regulations apply to various nations. However, if a case is brought before the courts, the evidence can be examined to determine its quality.

By systematically reducing the administrative burden and integrating quality management into our solution, we have already made an investment in quality management, ensuring evidenced compliance with quality and operational requirements. Processes and procedures can be digitized with our NIMBUS’s flexible workflow engine, making it possible for NIMBUS to always be current, relevant, and a primary driver of improvements in risk management and productivity throughout the organization.

For quite a while, the disciplines around insight and examinations have been isolated. Managing siloed information normally causes time punishments in time-touchy circumstances, and this has come through heritage working work on lacking innovation. Today, the technology exists in a single secure, permissioned environment from the intelligence’s beginning to its conclusion. Through watchlists, notifications, and alerts, this makes it possible for any authorized user of the technology to benefit from reporting, sanitization, dissemination, and analytical work. Once more, improving efficiency by delivering the appropriate information to the appropriate individual at the appropriate time.

A further integral capability for the production, management, analysis, and reporting of intelligence is included in NIMBUS. These are scalable to petabytes because they are partially accelerated by the Elastic Search platform. Depending on the use case (Police, Counter Terrorism, Cyber, National Intelligence, etc.), in addition to the primary case or incident data available within Operational Analytics, all or a separated subset (Individuals, Items, Areas, Occasions, for instance), can be consequently designated and added to the motor, giving constant admittance to possibly significant data. Depending on the case’s risk profile, this can be automated in the background using the Orchestration module. This rich wellspring of relevant information can empower significant example matching across situations where no obvious connections were recently known.

Additionally, the NIMBUS intelligence module can search third-party databases using an aggregation model or extract all data from legacy databases and store it locally. Access to additional databases like driver’s license and number plate data, passport and border control data, international watch lists, and director and ownership list data, when integrated with NIMBUS’s Investigation Toolkit, can significantly speed up the investigation.

What are your long-term ambitions for BlackRainbow and where do you see yourself in the future?

The next phase of Black Rainbow’s business is further expansion and adaptability to the changing market in order to complement our existing customers in the Americas; In Reston, Virginia, we recently opened our offices. Providing technology that can be used by the industry in which we have all worked and served for many years has always been our guiding principle. Black Rainbow really wants to help us all improve how we do our daily work and make a difference. They also want to keep talking to our customers and focus groups about how to improve NIMBUS at every step.

How would you advise aspiring entrepreneurs interested in entering the computer security industry?

Many organizations provide the same service, with some performing better than others. If the wheel is broken, you don’t need to make one; notwithstanding, understanding where holes or critical upgrades are required can be gold residue. Be passionate and driven, discover the niche, and take ownership of it, all while paying attention to what the market, industry, and laws are saying.