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Telco’s Face Hurdles with Data Retention Act say Hitachi

The Data Retention Regulations, which put most of the EU Data Retention Directive into UK law, have been approved by the House of Lords and signed into law by our Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. As this is has now passed through the Lords telcos have to act to meet the 15th September 2007 deadline for implementation. On this date telcos will have to have solutions in place to log call information for 12 months and this will gradually extend to storing VoIP, email and internet access details.

Telcos need to take action and ensure they have solutions in place because:

-The amount of data that is required to be archived is substantial. One billion CDRs (call detail records) may need to be collected and retained within the course of a single business day. Gartner estimates that up to 50,000 terabytes of additional data will be collected within the EU alone thus the storage system needs to be able to scale without performance degradation.

-Any storage system that meets the needs of the directive has to be able to retain the data for the time specified, be able to perform data destruction when the time has come, be able to authenticate the records to ensure that they are not altered and be able to produce CDR records as and when requested.

-Telcos face inspections and fines if they fail to comply.

Hitachi Data Systems has partnered with FileTek to provide a content archiving solution for telcos and ISPs to meet the need of the directive and ensure that all data is stored according to the guidelines.

Steve Murphy, UK MD for Hitachi Data Systems says:

"The EU data directive has huge implications for telcos and ISPs both in the financial sense and resource sense. Communications providers will not be able to use the databases for commercial purposes so the challenge comes in addressing the needs of the directive with minimal costs. It is imperative that communications providers make the right choice now so they don't face fines or have to implement another storage system when the directive evolves to include other forms of communications such as VoIP and email."

"The key things that telcos needs to consider are availability, high performance, scalability, flexibility and openness.

They need to implement storage systems that are deployed on a reliable IT platform, can process huge amounts of data, can evolve with information system changes, can conform with any format changes and can interface with any mediation and/or billing system. Telcos also have to be able to ensure that data can be accessed easily and supplied to authorities as and when requested."