Data retention will soon be a legal requirement for all operators in the EU. The directive, 2006/24/EC, was approved in March 2006 and must be incorporated into national laws by September 15, 2007.
Under the directive, operators have to store certain traffic and administrative data generated by public telecom and internet services for the purpose of detection, investigation and prosecution of serious crimes. The source, destination, date, time and duration, and the type of communication, must be retained for all calls and all unsuccessful call attempts. The data can only be used for investigating crime.
ADRS automatically collects and stores data specified in the directive from both Ericsson and non-Ericsson nodes, in circuit-switched and packet-switched networks, for both mobile and fixed communication. This data can then be retrieved by authorities over a secure interface.
The EU directive imposes very strict rules for data protection and security. The data must be protected against any kind of loss, destruction or alteration, and against unauthorized storage, access, processing or disclosure. The data may be accessed only by authorized personnel and must be destroyed at the end of a specified period.
Bo Johansson, business solution manager at Ericsson, says: "Today's data warehouse solutions will not be sufficient. Ericsson ADRS has high security in terms of data availability, integrity and protection, and works uninterrupted in a complex and growing network infrastructure."
Ericsson ADRS, he explains, fulfils all legal requirements on data retention and offers an automatic and cost-efficient data retention solution in a highly secure environment.
Being an active ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) member, Ericsson ensures that the ADRS solution complies with the ETSI standards on data retention.
The design, which is based on front-end technology, reduces the need for data storage capacity to a minimum. Only data that is legally required will be retained, and the erasure of data when the retention period has expired is handled automatically. The design enables the Ericsson ADRS to optimize opex and require only a small number of operational staff. Capex is also optimized as ADRS runs on open platforms.
ADRS offers the possibility of expansion, when needed, by adding more servers to the existing configuration and increasing the processor capacity.
