Telefonica O2 Ireland Calls on EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Telefonica O2 Ireland has implemented an EMC Centera and SenSage, Inc. solution to extend compliance with the EU Data Retention Directive to capture and retain Call Detail Records (CDRs) and make them accessible for rapid evidential analysis by law enforcement authorities.

Telefonica O2 Ireland, a leading provider of mobile services and communications solutions in Ireland, can now meet Irish Law Enforcement requirements across a broader set of parameters in minutes rather than days.

"We received a high volume of requests per month from law enforcement agencies in 2008," said Denise Murphy, Fraud and Security Manager for Telefonica O2 Ireland. "The EMC Centera/SenSage solution allows us to deploy a system quickly to our users facing increasing demands from the Irish Law Enforcement authorities. Additionally, we readily gained acceptance from the users who saw a vast improvement in their capabilities to meet the requests passed into the operator. Turnaround times have been reduced from days to minutes while operational costs remain within acceptable limits."

According to Economist Intelligence Unit’s recent survey titled, The Future of Enterprise Information Governance, nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated their companies had no formal information governance program in place, a concerning trend that may leave many corporations unprepared for new compliance mandates and open to preventable risks to sensitive information. Under the EU Data Retention Directive, telecommunications companies must now retain CDRs for all answered and unanswered calls from six months to two years, which could result in millions of wireless and wireline phone CDRs per day and billions of records that must be stored, maintained and accessible.

To comply with the Directive, Telefonica O2 Ireland chose the EMC Centera/SenSage Solution for Communications Service Providers. SenSage’s Event Data Warehouse solution enables billions of records to be scanned and analyzed in a short period of time, creating actionable results at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouse solutions. The call and IP event data records are then securely archived and readily accessible from an EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) repository for as long as necessary. Additionally, as an existing EMC customer, Telefonica O2 Ireland has expanded its EMC information infrastructure beyond just compliance to meet the performance and availability requirements from its day-to-day business.

"Having a system which is both flexible and scalable is critical to our needs," said Owen Connolly, Principal Security Specialist at Telefonica O2 Ireland. "The EMC Centera/SenSage solution gives us just that while remaining at a relatively low cost compared to traditional alternatives. The synergistic combination of technology allows us to significantly improve our reaction to Law Enforcement requests and offers great scope to expand into other areas of the business such as Compliance and Revenue Assurance."

SenSage, Inc. offers patented event data warehouse solutions that provide actionable results from massive amounts of log and event data. More than 400 customers have deployed SenSage solutions to reduce security, fraud and compliance risks at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouses and log management solutions.

More on EMC Centera and SenSage solution