Secure Cloud Infrastructure for Global Human Rights Documentation

CIR collects, verifies, and analyzes hundreds of open-source entries weekly (such as social media posts and satellite imagery) to document war crimes. The organization grew rapidly, causing manual workflows in Google Sheets to become a bottleneck for scalability, consistency, and speed.

Furthermore, the collected information is geopolitically highly sensitive. Ensuring data security and preventing tampering or unauthorized access was of critical importance to preserve the integrity of the evidence.

The complexity lay in building an infrastructure that was both maximally secure and highly scalable, without hindering the operational agility of the investigators. CIR’s data and tech team lacked the specific cloud engineering and machine learning expertise required to design and build such a sophisticated system, necessitating specialized external support to realize this transition to a professional and future-proof data infrastructure.

BDR designed and implemented a scalable AWS cloud environment using Terraform (Infrastructure as Code). To replace manual Google Sheets workflows, Atlos was integrated for digital witness programs. Mage AI was deployed to automate processes such as automatic attribute tagging and automated report generation.

To safeguard data security, BDR implemented rigorous security protocols, automatic backups, granular permission management, and rapid deployment pipelines via Terraform. The consultants contributed deep cloud, engineering, and machine learning expertise.

Through this close, strategic partnership, BDR not only implemented the technology but also structurally enhanced the data maturity of CIR's data and tech team. This enables CIR to manage the infrastructure independently, scale resources efficiently, and rapidly deploy the platform to document human rights violations in new conflict zones.