Telefonica O2 Ireland Upgrades Platform Due to EU Data Retention Rules

The Irish arm of mobile network operator, Telefonica O2 has upgraded its data retention capabilities to ensure compliance with the EU Data Retention Directive to capture and retain Call Detail Records (CDRs) and make them accessible for rapid evidential analysis by law enforcement authorities.

"We received a high volume of requests per month from law enforcement agencies in 2008," said Denise Murphy, Fraud and Security Manager for Telefonica O2 Ireland. "The EMC Centera/SenSage solution allows us to deploy a system quickly to our users facing increasing demands from the Irish Law Enforcement authorities. Additionally, we readily gained acceptance from the users who saw a vast improvement in their capabilities to meet the requests passed into the operator. Turnaround times have been reduced from days to minutes while operational costs remain within acceptable limits."

Under the EU Data Retention Directive, telecommunications companies must now retain CDRs for all answered and unanswered calls from six months to two years, which could result in millions of wireless and wireline phone CDRs per day and billions of records that must be stored, maintained and accessible.

To comply with the Directive, Telefonica O2 Ireland chose the EMC Centera/SenSage Solution for Communications Service Providers. SenSage's Event Data Warehouse solution enables billions of records to be scanned and analyzed in a short period of time, creating actionable results at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouse solutions.

"Having a system which is both flexible and scalable is critical to our needs," said Owen Connolly, Principal Security Specialist at Telefonica O2 Ireland. "The EMC Centera/SenSage solution gives us just that while remaining at a relatively low cost compared to traditional alternatives. The synergistic combination of technology allows us to significantly improve our reaction to Law Enforcement requests and offers great scope to expand into other areas of the business such as Compliance and Revenue Assurance."

Posted to the site on 2nd June 2009