Large Telco Meets Lawful Disclosure Requirements, Saves 80% with Ocient
After many years of growth, a North American telecommunications company (telco) was facing increased pressure to comply with service level agreements (SLAs) around the lawful disclosure of call detail records (CDRs).
The SLAs mandated that the telco be able to load CDR data continuously, retrieve it rapidly, and perform thousands of queries per day against both current and historical data within very tight timeframes — less than a minute for the most urgent queries. The telco’s existing CDR storage and analysis solution was taking too long to return results — or timing out entirely, rendering the telco unable to deliver results at all.
The SLAs also required that the telco keep CDR data readily accessible for up to two years. For this customer, that meant making over 15 trillion records available for query at all times. Upgrading the incumbent solution to meet these parameters would have been expensive — at least $5 million — with no guarantee it would deliver better results.
Finally, the telco was already managing 1.6 Gbps of CDR traffic — about one million records per second — around the clock. These numbers will only continue to grow, making it increasingly difficult to meet existing SLAs and setting the stage for more challenges as lawful disclosure requests become more detailed and frequent. The telco needed a solution that would meet its current lawful disclosure needs while setting it up to meet even bigger data challenges in the future.
A Fully Integrated Lawful Disclosure Solution
Ocient and the customer met to review the telco’s existing lawful disclosure environment, examining the solution’s data sourcing, data storage and analysis, and law enforcement agency (LEA) interface components. Next, the project team developed, tested, and delivered a solution designed to improve the organization’s ability to store and analyze CDR data.
The new solution, part of the Ocient Data Retention and Disclosure System, enables the telco to ingest, transform, and query CDR data concurrently, while also meeting or exceeding SLA timeframes. This is possible thanks to several unique components of the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse™, including:
- Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture®, which eliminates network bottlenecks and speeds time to query by placing the compute layer right next to the storage layer. Given that lawful disclosure requests require the telco to query current and historical datasets concurrently, this configuration offers telcos an enormous advantage
- Megalane™, which enables an extreme number of parallel tasks, ensuring that the telco can perform multiple queries while loading massive amounts of streaming data.
The solution also includes a services component delivered by Ocient Management Services. This includes 24×7 monitoring for critical issues, as well as regular system checks, workload monitoring and management, health snapshots, log collection, and more. The Ocient team also ensured that the new solution meets all the telco’s existing security requirements, thanks to security features including:
- Encryption at rest and in transit
- Integration with the customer’s existing identity provider via OpenID ConnectOIDC
- Integration with the secrets manager and key manager platforms
- OS hardening, security audits, vulnerability scanning, and anti-virus protection designed to meet the customer’s stringent security policies for customer data.
Better Performance and Lower Cost
By replacing its existing lawful disclosure system with an Ocient solution, the telco no longer struggles to meet SLAs. In fact, basic lawful disclosure queries that used to take 5-70 minutes now take just seconds. The solution will also scale easily as data volume and the number and scope of LEA inquiries increase, ensuring that the telco will continue meeting SLAs for years to come.
The Ocient solution also brought about significant cost savings for the telco. Thanks to Ocient’s Zero Copy Reliability™ and sophisticated compression techniques, the team was able fit the entire solution – over 15 PB of CDR data – onto a single 42U cabinet. This helped reduce the solution’s data center footprint, slashing electricity and cooling costs by 80%.
Finally, the solution satisfied the telco’s requirements without forcing a complete refresh of the telco’s lawful disclosure environment, thereby accelerating ROI. The Ocient system integrates seamlessly with the telco’s existing systems, rounding out an end-to-end solution that improves performance, cuts costs, and positions the telco for continued growth.
Learn more about Ocient solutions for the telecommunications industry in our Telco eBook.
Watch a short explainer video on the Ocient Data and Disclosure System.