In the fight against terrorism and crime, in many nations the telcos and communications service providers (henceforth collectively referred to as CSPs) are required by law to retain extensive records of all the metadata associated with communications that are transported across their networks.
Although it excludes the actual content of any data communications, this retained data does include, for example, the IP metadata, subscriber information and call data records (CDRs). This data is of significant value to law enforcement agencies (LEAs), who may be investigating the historical activity of Subjects of Interest (SoIs). Where necessary, LEAs may be authorised to approach CSPs with a warrant for the legal disclosure of specified historic metadata relating to the communications of targeted SoIs, and telcos and CSPs must respond with provision of that metadata within an acceptable time frame.
As directed by individual national legislation - and normally at their own cost - CSPs must therefore keep required records of prespecified communications metadata, encrypting and securely storing that metadata and ensuring its automatic deletion after defined time periods.
For many CSPs, unless implemented and managed efficiently, enabling and supporting the lawful disclosure of retained data can become an expensive burden that hinders development of new services and consumes valuable resources better deployed elsewhere.
Helping service providers meet compliance obligations with minimum impact on business objectives and focus
BAE Systems DataRetain is a market leading solution designed and built for CSPs, enabling them to cost-effectively, securely and efficiently capture, store, query, collate, and supply required metadata to LEAs in response to authorised requests for legal disclosure of retained data.
It has been developed during 30 years of working in partnership with some of the world’s most exacting CSPs, LEAs and governments in the ‘data retention’ space and is now increasingly being adopted by CSPs across the globe. In the past decade it has become the de facto standard solution for helping CSPs comply with national data retention legislation, providing a streamlined seamless interface between LEAs and CSP police liaison units and empowering authorised CSP users with the full breath of functionality required to run a trusted, secure, data disclosure service for compliance with LEA requests.
Scalable, Virtualised Solution
- BAE Systems Dataretain is a highly scalable, distributed and virtualised solution that fits directly into the CSPs’ IT estate. It provides the following features and benefits:
- A ‘self-service’ direct LEA user portal, providing capability for LEAs to input their requests directly into the system and receive rapid, authorised replies. This facilitates minimal disruption to CSP business operations and allows a higher volume of requests to be processed by a lower number of staff
- Deployment options range from a small scale urban broadband provider up to national scale quad play CSPs, with full or partial automation, as required
- A quick and simple user interface whose workflow management features can be easily configured to adapt to your current business processes
- Fast, compact and scalable encrypted data storage and retrieval, capable of storing billions of data records securely. Records are available for retrieval within seconds of being stored and can be retrieved within milliseconds
- NAT Resolution: there is a growing requirement for LEAs to understand which user was mapped to each IP address at any moment in time. DataRetain offers pre-built modules that support user queries on IP address resolution, providing capability to acquire, process and retrieve information relating to public and private IP addresses and match with relevant customer identifiers, effectively mapping the IP address used to each communications session
- A comprehensive audit trail of user transactions, helping assure that retained data is of evidential quality
- Manages the collection and storage of an extensive range of communications metadata, including call data records/billing events, IP allocations, web logs, subscriber account information
- Enables data records and results to be set for automatic deletion at the end of mandated data retention periods
- Can be implemented as a highly available solution with full back-up and disaster recovery achieved by replicating all data to a secondary system
- Offers multilingual support in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian
- Enables CSPs to adapt quickly to changes within their network, scaling with increases in data rates and processing of new data types.
Virtualised Cloud Native Deployment Option
The BAE Systems Data Retention solution may be deployed either as a traditional physical data retention solution for data retention and lawful disclosure, or as part of a next-generation cloud-native architecture in a private or public cloud environment. The cloud native deployment option offers:
- The security, control and separation of a traditional physical data retention solution.
- A secure public cloud deployment, with local sovereign hosting and support. Compliant with NCSC Guidelines. Equivalent classification official sensitive.
- Simple access with high availability by default and supports LEA self-service, with automated results provided directly to users.
- Auto-scaling data storage architecture and separation between individual CSP deployments; On Demand usage and schedule based processing
- A BAE Systems experienced helpdesk available 24/7 to support customers with queries and manage system responses; standalone training for CSPs available.
To learn more about BAE Systems DataRetain™ download the brochure below or contact us to speak with one of our experts