The law & your obligations, understanding your options

We can offer structured, impartial advice and support to make sure you get the right solution that works for your current and future needs, for the right value.

COMPLIANCE

Data Retention Mandates

Communications providers generate hundreds of millions of event records daily. Every phone call placed, connected, disconnected, etc. creates potentially critical event log data. Because of this, laws and regulations like the EU Directive 2006/24/EC and various business drivers (Marketing, security, Big data) push telecommunications providers to capture and retain years of this data.

In Australia, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 now requires communication providers to keep this metadata for two years to ensure its availability. Under this Act, CSPs are obligated to assist law enforcement agencies in their investigation into alleged crime and misconduct or any other unlawful activity. This follows around 25 western countries who have implemented similar data retention laws.

Key points

Data Retention Obligations

  • Carriers, carriage service providers and carriage service intermediaries are under an obligation to retain the required data, set out in six categories, for at least two years.
  • The data to be retained must be encrypted and protected from unauthorised interference or unauthorised access.
  • Service providers will need to consider the data for each of the services they offer. Depending on the type of service offered, service providers may not be required to retain all of the categories.

Regulators and government bodies are no longer simply imposing financial penalties on companies for LI and DR failure to comply; sanctions can affect individual and directors. As such, company executives are often intimidated and confused by their compliance burden especially in the legal interception and Data retention space.

Expertise

The SSI alternative

Data retention is uncharted territory. The good news is that SSI not only understands the need to meet the mounting compliance mandates, it has resources and expertise available to support and guide through the appropriate deployment. The SSI team has years of experience in the field of legal interception, Data retention and compliance with international standards, and have provided advice on strategies and procedures, solution design and implementation to dozens of Tier 1 and 2 Carriers worldwide as well as switch vendors and service providers.