Frequently Asked Questions.

Security
Reliability
Technicals
Procurement
Deployment

Security

1. Do I still own my content that is stored and processed by Scout?

Yes, you always retain full ownership and control of your content.

2. Does Scout mine my data, or use it in any way with 3rd parties?

No, it is your data and yours alone.

3. Can our agency/department manage its own encryption keys?

Yes, Scout supports symmetric customer-managed keys (CMK) with 256-bit encryption.  We are the only DEMS solution on the market that offers both of these features together.  They are central tenets to the FBI Cloud Computing Best Practices.

4. How does Scout encrypt data at rest?

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) specifies a FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data. The AES algorithm is a symmetric block cipher that can encrypt (encipher) and decrypt (decipher) information. Encryption converts data to an unintelligible form called ciphertext; decrypting the ciphertext converts the data back into its original form.

Scout supports symmetric customer-managed keys (CMK) with 256-bit encryption, per the latest CJIS guidelines.

5. How does Scout encyrpt data in transit?

Scout uses FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated endpoints and uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) and maintains the latest protocol version, currently 1.2.

We maintain current NIST guidelines concerning AES cipher suites, but we do not publicly list the algorithm subset suites that we employ. As NIST best-practice guidelines evolve, we will update and maintain accordingly.  Scout supports symmetric customer-managed keys (CMK) with 256-bit encryption, per the latest CJIS guidelines.

6. Does Scout support Multi-Factor authentication?

Yes Scout enforces MFA, with or without Active Directory (‘AD’) integration.  With AD integration, Scout ‘inherits’ whatever MFA settings your AD system administrator(s) have set.  When creating users directly in the Scout directory, we enforce TOTP (Time-based One-Time Passwords) that are out-of-band and further backed by biometrics through the user's mobile phone.

7. Does Scout use hardened containers?

Yes.  Details on our process are available on request.

8. What is AWS GovCloud?

AWS GovCloud (US) are isolated AWS Regions designed to allow U.S. government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements, including Federal Risk and Management Program (FedRAMP) High Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide (DoD SRG) Impact Level 5, and Criminal Justice Services (CJIS). The AWS GovCloud (US) adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements.

You can run workloads that contain all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) data and government-oriented, publicly available data in AWS GovCloud (US). The AWS GovCloud (US) Region maintains the region with U.S. citizens only and provides customers with the ability to access the region through FIPS 140-2 service endpoints.

AWS is the undisputed leader in FedRAMP High certified space with more than 3.5x the authorizations as Azure Government Cloud (April 2023).

9. What is adaptive authentication?

Adaptive authentication can block suspicious sign-ins, or require step-up authentication. For each sign-in attempt, a risk score is generated for how likely the sign-in request is to be from a compromised source. This risk score is based on many factors, including whether it detects a new device, user location, or IP address. Device fingerprinting helps track these factors. There are several second-factor authentication options in response to an increased risk level.

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Reliability

1. Does Scout offer global availability?

Yes. AWS global coverage spans 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic Regions (region map here), and 191 points of presence through the edge network.

2. What other regions can Scout be deployed to besides AWS GovCloud and AWS Commercial (US) regions?

Scout can be deployed in the following ten (10) international regions as-of April 2022:

  • Canada (Montreal)
  • Brazil (Sao Paulo)
  • Europe (London)
  • Europe (Dublin)
  • Europe (Frankfurt)
  • India (Mumbai)
  • Australia (Sydney)
  • Singapore
  • Korea (Seoul)
  • Japan (Tokyo)
  • Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and Africa (Cape Town) are all pending and should be available later in 2022

3. Does Scout offer high availability?

Our architecture design handles automatically scaling up (larger compute), as well as scaling out (more instances), so that the system is always the ‘right’ size for your workloads and delivers consistent high performance.

Most often the system scales out with more instances, distributing the workload among them, to reduce the impact of a single point of failure.

Monitoring metrics, and using automated recovery processes, ensures reliability for operational consistency.

4. Does Scout run on modern development principles?

Yes, we use Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) to build, commit, pipeline, and deploy the containers and microservices that, in aggregate, are the application.

5. Revir claims it is built on “the best cloud” - how can I verify this?

We encourage you to do your homework.

Consider that AWS’s cloud revenue is double Azure’s, and their most recent [quarterly revenue] dollar gain is still larger than the number 2-5 [rivals] combined.

Or look at the independent research firms that analyze data from the major cloud providers to detail statistics like this:

“Based on the vendors own reported numbers, from the beginning of 2018 through May 3, 2019, AWS leads the pack with only 338 hours of downtime, followed by GCP closely at 361. Microsoft Azure has a whopping total of 1,934 hours of self-reported downtime.”

Also see this June 2019 Gartner report where AWS scored #1 in 7-of-8 categories.

Consider that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has adopted AWS over 5 years ago and FBI CJIS is running its production workload on AWS GovCloud.

6. What other government agencies run on AWS?

Back in 2017, the company announced the new AWS Secret Region with which AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications. Currently, over 5,000 government agencies use AWS.

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1. Does Scout offer global availability?

Yes. AWS global coverage spans 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic Regions (region map here), and 191 points of presence through the edge network.

2. What other regions can Scout be deployed to besides AWS GovCloud and AWS Commercial (US) regions?

Scout can be deployed in the following ten (10) international regions as-of April 2024:

  • Canada (Montreal)
  • Brazil (Sao Paulo)
  • Europe (London)
  • Europe (Dublin)
  • Europe (Frankfurt)
  • India (Mumbai)
  • Australia (Sydney)
  • Singapore
  • Korea (Seoul)
  • Japan (Tokyo)
  • Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and Africa (Cape Town) are all pending and should be available later in 2022

3. Does Scout offer high availability?

Our architecture design handles automatically scaling up (larger compute), as well as scaling out (more instances), so that the system is always the ‘right’ size for your workloads and delivers consistent high performance.

Most often the system scales out with more instances, distributing the workload among them, to reduce the impact of a single point of failure.

Monitoring metrics, and using automated recovery processes, ensures reliability for operational consistency.

4. Does Revir run on modern development principles?

Yes, we use Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) to build, commit, pipeline, and deploy the containers and microservices that, in aggregate, are the application.

5. Revir claims it is built on “the best cloud” - how can I verify this?

We encourage you to do your homework.

Consider that AWS’s cloud revenue is double Azure’s, and their most recent [quarterly revenue] dollar gain is still larger than the number 2-5 [rivals] combined.

Or look at the independent research firms that analyze data from the major cloud providers to detail statistics like this:

“Based on the vendors own reported numbers, from the beginning of 2018 through May 3, 2019, AWS leads the pack with only 338 hours of downtime, followed by GCP closely at 361. Microsoft Azure has a whopping total of 1,934 hours of self-reported downtime.”

Also see this June 2019 Gartner report where AWS scored #1 in 7-of-8 categories.

Consider that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has adopted AWS over 5 years ago and FBI CJIS is running its production workload on AWS GovCloud.

6. What other government agencies run on AWS?

Back in 2017, the company announced the new AWS Secret Region with which AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications. Currently, over 5,000 government agencies use AWS.

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Technicals

1. How big of a file can I load?

Files up to 5TB in size can be uploaded - but we hope (for your sake) that you aren’t handling 5 terabyte files!  Since a 1 gigabyte file represents about an hour of standard resolution video, 5,000 gigabytes would be a very big file indeed.

2. What file types are supported?

Scout supports:

  • Video (see questions 3, 4)
  • Audio (MP4, MP3, WAV, FLAC, WAV, AMR, AMR-WB, OGG, WebM)
  • Images (JPG/JPEG, PNG, HEIF/HEIC, GIF, BMP, SVG)
  • PDF
  • Text (.txt)
  • Zip

3. What video containers (file formats) does Scout support?

Scout supports eighteen (18) different file types:

  • 3G2
  • 3GP/3GPP
  • ASF (Advanced Systems Format)
  • AVI
  • Adobe Flash
  • Genetec (G64x, G64)
  • HLS (MPEG-2 TS segments)
  • IMF (Interoperable Master Format)
  • Matroska
  • MOV (Quicktime)
  • MPEG-PS (Program Stream)
  • MPEG-TS (Transport Stream)
  • MPEG-SS (System Stream)
  • MP4
  • MXF (Material eXchange Format)
  • no container
  • WebM
  • WMV (Windows Media Video)

*Media Container = video format (video codec) + audio format (audio codec) + subtitle.

4. What video formats (codecs) does Scout support?

Scout supports thirty-one (31) different codecs:

  • Apple ProRes
  • AVC (H.264)
  • AVC Intra 50/100
  • Canopus HQ
  • DivX/Xvid
  • DNxHD
  • DV/DVCPRO
  • DV25
  • DV50
  • DVCPro HD
  • Flash 9 File
  • H.261
  • H.262
  • H.263
  • H.264
  • HEVC (H.265)
  • JPEG 2000
  • JPEG 2000 (J2K)
  • MJPEG
  • MPEG-1
  • MPEG-2
  • MPEG-4 part 2
  • Panasonic P2
  • PCM
  • QuickTime Animation (RLE)
  • SonyXDCam
  • SonyXDCam MPEG-4 Proxy
  • Uncompressed
  • VC-1
  • VP8
  • VP9

*Media Container/File contains a video format (video codec) + audio format (audio codec) + subtitle.

5. What is the min/max frames per second (FPS) that Scout supports?

The minimum frame rate is 5 fps and there is no maximum.

6. How long of a video can I analyze?

Videos up to 6 hours in length and up to 10GB in size can be analyzed with computer vision.

7. How long of an audio file can I auto-transcribe?

Audio up to 4 hours in length can be transcribed.

8. What languages are supported for transcription?

  • Gulf Arabic
  • Modern Standard Arabic
  • Chinese Mandarin (Mainland)
  • Dutch
  • Australian English*
  • British English*
  • Indian English
  • Irish English
  • Scottish English
  • US English*
  • Welsh English
  • Spanish
  • US Spanish*
  • French*
  • Canadian French*
  • Farsi
  • German
  • Swiss German
  • Hebrew
  • Indian Hindi
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Malay
  • Portuguese
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Tamil
  • Telugu
  • Turkish

Translation supported for 987 language pairs
*supports streaming real-time transcription

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Procurement

1. Is the solution cloud-based and in alignment with the FBI’s “cloud first” directive?

Yes, Scout is designed for the FBI’s “cloud first” directive. It is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the undisputed dominant leader in cloud computing. Overview.
Additionally, AWS GovCloud is the undisputed leader in FedRAMP High certified space with more than 3.5x the authorizations as Azure Government Cloud.

2. What public sector contract vehicles do you support?

We can offer a number of major contracts such as NASPO ValuePoint Cloud Multi-State Multi-Vendor IDIQ, SEWP, GSA IT Schedule 70, CIO-CS, DoD Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI), U.S. Communities, Internet2, AWS, and more.

3. How, and when, am I billed?

Enjoy one invoice from AWS that provides total transparency of your infrastructure and Scout costs. There are no hidden fees and you only pay for what your agency uses. Revir offers annual and multi-year contracts with flexible payment terms. We can specify a custom schedule of payments, with net-30 or net-60 terms, and up to 36 installments over three years.

4. What if our department, or agency, doesn’t have an AWS account?

Opening an AWS account is easy and we can assist you in this process.

5. Can I get a trial of Scout?

We would love to accommodate this request. Please email us: public.sector@revir.ai.

Deployment

1. Have your AWS GovCloud account number ready.  (5 minutes)

Even if you already have an AWS GovCloud account, we recommend opening a new one to isolate Scout in.  AWS accounts are free to open and this takes only a few minutes.   If you need help with this step, please email us at:  public.sector@revir.ai.

2. Purchase through one of our partners.  (varies)

Some agencies can purchase direct without a cooperative contract vehicle;  some cooperative contract vehicles allow for immediate sole source purchase.  We can help coordinate contract vehicles through our various partners.

3. Infrastructure deployment (45 minutes… really.)

Scout PD’s deployment team will coordinate with you to decide on a few things, such as:

  • What will your login URL be?
  • Are we integrating with your Active Directory?  

After a few details like this are discussed/confirmed, our team pushes a button and 25 minutes later you have the same computing power as FBI, Netflix, Disney, and ESPN.

End-users do not need to install anything as they will access the application through a browser.

4. Coordinate training times (90 minutes, as needed)

Scout’s onboarding team will plan group training times for end users and train-the-trainers. Our Knowledge Base (‘KB’) offers on-demand answers to common questions.  Ongoing support is available via KB, phone, and email through the Scout application.

5. Ponder a simple question (1 minute)

Has an enterprise software ever been so easy to launch, while providing so much capability, cost transparency, security, and scale?
Nope.