Ensuring Billing Records Comply With EU Law
EMC Corporation, Intec Telecom Systems and SenSage say that they have pooled resources to provide a solution to answer the mandates of the recently passed EU Data Retention Directive. The combined technologies tackle two issues. First, it provides telecommunication and Internet service providers with a lower cost means to manage communication records that support compliance with the Directive. Second, it enables law enforcement agencies to quickly access historical phone and Internet records to pinpoint and prosecute serious crimes.
The Directive states that all service providers must be compliant by August, 2007.
The EU Data Retention Directive was announced in March 2006. It requires telecommunications operators (Telcos) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to securely retain and be able to analyse traffic and location data related to; fixed telephony; mobile telephony; Internet access; Internet e-mail; and Internet telephony for up to two years. The Directive further requires that all service providers must produce answers to law enforcement inquiries without any undue delay. Millions of calls and connections occur each day equating to billions of records and terabytes of transaction data that must be securely stored and rapidly analysed.
EMC, Intec and SenSage have developed a joint EU Data Retention solution that significantly reduces the cost of compliant data management for service providers. The combined technology completely supports the guidelines set out by the Directive and is able to cost-effectively manage and obtain results in minutes from over 100 billion Call Detail Records (CDR).
"The EU Data Retention Directive puts tremendous pressure and a clear timeline on Telcos and ISPS to meet security and investigation obligations," said Fernando Elizalde, senior telecommunications analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "The newly developed technology offered by EMC, Intec and SenSage supports the Directive mandates by providing a progressive, scalable platform, to cost-effectively manage the broad event data integration, storage and analysis requisites."
"Telcos and ISPs will have to make significant changes to procedure, operations and current technologies if they are to meet the EU Data Retention and Privacy Directives," said Terje Tondel, managing director of ETIS.org - the largest global IT association for telecommunication providers. "Our constituents have been advised to assess current resources and seek innovative solutions, such as that from EMC, Intec and SenSage, which can minimise costs and expedite results that address these guidelines".
The joint solution has been fully tested with sample CDR data from a leading telecommunications provider. The sample data, collected and processed through an Intec mediation platform, was cleansed, then subsequently randomised and replicated to generate the necessary volume. SenSage provides the scalable event data management platform that powers the collection, compression, management and high-speed analysis of the CDR data. Retention and online availability of the stored data is fully managed within an EMC Centera storage cluster, which provides increased data integrity, protection, and availability capabilities. Intec provided switch remediation expertise and design guidance. The Proof-of-Concept (POC) contains 100 billion records, representing 13 terabytes of raw compressed data. It is now maintained in an online, referenceable repository where complex analytics can quickly be performed to investigate criminal activity.
"The EU Data Retention directive increases the cost of doing business for Telco's and ISP," said Jim Pflaging, president and CEO of SenSage. "This joint solution offers the rapid response law enforcement needs in a highly secure system the public wants, at the lowest cost to the service provider."
The joint PoC simulated retention of two years of CDR data of 10 million Telco subscribers. The system executed un-indexed queries at more than 27.9 million records per second and obtained answers in less than seven minutes within a three month search range."
Posted to the site on 2nd October 2006
