By Ocient Staff

Communication service providers (CSPs) today must be prepared to meet or exceed stringent laws around the lawful disclosure of their data in support of law enforcement activities. However, the steady increase in the volume and velocity of communication data, paired with aging or poorly designed lawful disclosure systems, makes adhering to these laws extremely challenging.  

As a result, CSPs are looking for new ways to collect, analyze, and disclose data in a manner that satisfies compliance and legal requirements without sacrificing operational efficiency or compromising customer trust. The ability to comply with these disclosure requests is also becoming a key consideration as CSPs think about building future-ready tech stacks — and balancing compliance, ease of operations, and cost effectiveness.  

Expanding lawful disclosure regulations  

All over the world, lawmakers, regulators, and CSPs are developing far-reaching and nuanced lawful disclosure policies that lay out precise requirements around data retention, querying capabilities, and response times. At the same time, data privacy and data security have become spotlight topics in the public conversation around companies in every industry, with telecommunications among the most heavily scrutinized.  

Hence, many CSPs are forced into a balancing act: they must comply with lawful disclosure requests within rigid parameters to keep regulators happy, while maintaining transparent controls that demonstrate an unwavering commitment to data privacy in order to protect their reputations and keep customers happy. And they need to master this balance without losing control of their bottom line, so they can maintain margins and profitability in an extremely competitive industry. 

Breaking down the data management challenges of lawful disclosure for CSPs 

Staying ahead of lawful disclosure requests will be challenging for CSPs on five major fronts. Their data management protocols will need to include highly advanced ingestion, enrichment, and retrieval functions that may go beyond their current capabilities — while delivering the high-assurance security capabilities CSPs need to protect their customers and providing the interoperability to fit within the broader tech stack of a modern CSP. 

Ingesting high-velocity data 

Telecommunications sits at or near the top of the most data-intensive industries in the world. Every call made, text sent, or internet connection established generates a wealth of data that needs to be collected, stored, and managed — CDR data, ICR, IP and network data, as well as customer, location and IoT data, to name just a few types. This data is generated at a very high velocity — streaming off networks from a variety of connected devices in real time at a rate of up to 10 million+ records per second.  

Ingesting this data onto a usable storage platform requires reliable processes; loading and preparing it for analysis is extremely resource intensive. A lot of CSPs are recognizing that their data platforms simply aren’t up to the task, and they’re bolting on additional capacity to existing systems — at a high cost, both in terms of the technology itself and time-intensive management of legacy tech.  

Accommodating the high-velocity ingestion required for lawful disclosure through these conventional means could massively increase the costs CSPs face just to keep their services running.  

Enriching high-volume data 

Apart from the velocity, the sheer volume of data retention comes with its own set of complications. Many lawful disclosure policies stipulate that CSPs must store petabytes and petabytes of ICR, IP and other data, often for extended periods. 

Many of these policies also require that CSPs be able to enrich that data with data from additional sources, such as location or equipment information. This layers on another ingestion challenge, as CSPs must be able to pull in data from multiple sources — and prepare all that data so disparate data sets can be quickly and reliably connected for enrichment when necessary.   

Rapid data retrieval 

The new wave of CSP regulations and lawful disclosure requirements stipulate that CSPs be able to retrieve information rapidly through SQL and advanced analysis techniques. Legal requests often come with specific, time-sensitive parameters, and CSPs must be ready to query trillions of rows of data and come back with exactly what a government body is looking for — sometimes very quickly.  

This querying speed across such a volume of data outstrips most CSPs’ data management abilities. And many CSPs are struggling to find cost-effective solutions that allow them to support rapid, comprehensive retrieval processes. 

Ensuring data security 

In addition to meeting rising data volume and velocity demands, CSPs must also address stringent security requirements. To meet the growing body of data privacy and consumer protection requirements, CSPs need to implement comprehensive and robust business and system controls to ensure only the select few authorized and authenticated users within the company can access this very sensitive data. This data security is crucial in order to prevent unauthorized access and ensure sensitive customer information remains protected. 

Seamless interoperability 

Lawful disclosure systems must be able to ingest high-volume, high-velocity data from various sources. But the components of the system that handle data sourcing and ingestion must be seamlessly interoperable with those that handle analysis, retrieval, and disclosure of that data. This allows CSPs to meet the short and strict timelines of law enforcement agencies, while also ensuring that CSPs do not waste excessive time and cost manually connecting data sets and pulling out relevant data. 

How Ocient can help 

Ocient solves several challenges that CSPs face around compliance with legal disclosure requirements. The Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System, powered by the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse™, brings together the collection, transformation, ingestion, analysis, and disclosure of network metadata in one seamless stack. By consolidating all of these data management demands and solutions within one powerful platform, Ocient not only helps organizations mitigate compliance risk and realize scalable cost efficiencies — but also harness new business value through real-time insight and analysis of millions of network flows every second.  

High-performance ingestion and retrieval 

Ocient’s consolidated data retention platform can easily match the ingestion pace necessary for compliance with today’s legal disclosure requests. Ocient’s ability to process millions of records per second is underpinned by Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA)®, Megalane™ technology, and built-in extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. Together, these innovations enable rapid time-to-query and extreme parallel processing, ensuring that CSPs can quickly retrieve relevant information — even from massive, complex data sets. 

Ocient’s platform also includes sophisticated workload management features that allow CSPs to prioritize critical queries without compromising broader query performance. 

Efficient storage to reduce data processing demands & energy consumption 

Ocient’s data storage protocols avoid replication, ensuring data integrity with a much smaller overhead than conventional and competitor solutions. This process — combining flexible, efficient parity and erasure coding, sophisticated compression techniques, and NVMe performance — reduces the amount of data to be stored while also reducing data loss. 

This also translates into less data center space required and can drive as much as a 90% reduction in energy consumption around data processing, compared to legacy solutions. 

Advanced analytics and geospatial support 

Ocient’s data platform is built from the ground up to make it easier and faster to find and activate the data you need at massive volume and velocity — including the query speeds necessary to meet law enforcement SLAs. Powerful SQL aggregation and window functions make it easy to identify and track unique patterns across massive datasets. Moreover, OcientGeo™, a native component, supports geospatial indexes and a variety of geospatial datatypes, making it easy to use location data to limit query results to a specific location, area, country, or continent and correlate them with time and event data.  

Infrastructure designed for future-ready data privacy compliance 

Ocient’s platform is designed with robust security features to enable compliance with data privacy regulations. Our infrastructure enables strict separation between legal disclosure systems and the rest of the enterprise tech stack, layering on advanced encryption, access control, and isolation protocols to protect sensitive customer information from unauthorized access. The highly scalable and flexible architecture of the Ocient platform is designed to scale seamlessly as data volume grows, providing CSPs with a future-ready foundation for a dynamic regulatory landscape. 

Foundational interoperability to drive efficiency 

Unlike so many providers of “all-in-one” platforms that have relied on M&A to round out their offerings, Ocient’s platform was built from the ground up to work together harmoniously. Our solution integrates data ingestion, enrichment, and retrieval functions for a wide variety of data types in a unified architecture, allowing data to flow smoothly between system components and through highly efficient workflows. This minimizes data handling and reduces operational delays, not only allowing CSPs to meet tight legal disclosure timelines, but minimizing the internal costs of complying with these requests. 

The imperative of harnessing big data 

Tightening regulations demand that CSPs have full control of the growing volume, velocity and variety of data being generated by their organizations. But perhaps an even greater imperative comes from the inexorable growth of the telecommunications industry: not only must CSPs be able to respond to lawful disclosure requests that tap into the enormous volume of data generated by their networks today; they must be prepared to continue delivering those results as additional consumer services are enabled, new network technologies are deployed, and data volumes continue to grow…well into the future.  

Want to learn more about how Ocient can help you put future-ready data architecture in place to drive compliance and create new business value? Get in touch with one of our experts and start a conversation about how to jumpstart and simplify your data management.