Data Retention for Telecommunications | SQream

Business Value Case

Data Retention for Telecommunications

Reduction of 50%
in TCO
Support 3.6 PB
with minimum cost
5x faster
ingestion

A leader in the telecommunication industry, a large telecom in APAC has adopted SQream to comply with legal obligations and court authorities, in addition to implementing the lawful interception system it needed to deploy to meet 3GPP standards. The request arrived after the head of BI was required to provide the ability to store and query 3.6 petabytes yearly (generated from 10M subscribers) together with fast ingestion, reduction of TCO, and incompute storage.

The telecom’s legacy big data system was not able to cope with the huge amounts of additional data generated by the IPDRs.

Industry Vertical: Telecom
Economic Buyer: Head of BI; CIO

 

Why Do Anything?

The platforms that were in use, Exadata and Cloudera, failed to provide the needed services. The organization’s data had to be accurate and up-to-date for external users (law enforcement), while providing the ability of fast query retrieval using REST API.

Why Now?

The telecom needed to come up with an alternative solution that could handle the rising number of IPDRs, which were hundreds of times greater than CDRs in their peta-scale datasets.

They required fast integration and interface to their warrant query interface, the ability to scale up if needed, and fast adoption into the organization (with no additional training). Lastly, the 3 nines availability and strict security standards were mandatory, in addition to compliance with EU GDPR regulations.

Why SQream?

  • Near-real-time feedback
  • Rapid ingestion
  • Ability to rapidly join many tables with large datasets
  • Ability to directly query the data lake without ingesting the data into the system
  • ANSI SQL compatibility – easy to handle by teams
  • Less allocated servers and storage
  • 99.9% availability

Fastest time to insight on any size data

Business Challenge

Data retention defines the policies of persistent data and record management for meeting legal and business data archival requirements. Telecommunication companies are required to keep call detail records (CDRs) of telephony/internet traffic data (IPDRs). By analyzing the retained data, governments can identify the locations of individuals, and other traffic parameters that may be needed by law enforcement.

Customer service providers are required to keep telecommunication data for a minimum of six-months, and at most, twenty-four months, depending on the region/country.

Law enforcement authorities should have the ability to:

  • Trace and identify the source /destination of a communication;
  • Identify the date, time, and duration of a communication;
  • Identify the type of communication;
  • Identify the communication device;
  • Identify the location of mobile communication equipment.

The CSPs are required to have detailed transparent reporting of all recorded events; complete logging of all events; 99.9% availability; and near-real time reporting and access to accumulated information

SQream Benefits

Using the SQream platform, the customer was able to ingest 10 TB daily. The telecom was able to provide the needed information in (near) real-time to law enforcement, in addition to having the ability to query the data lake directly, and to cross-join information from multiple resources. The telecom reduced their TCO on data retention activity (which was considered a sunk cost that is required by law authorities) by 20%.

SQream Solution Components
  • SQream Ad-Hoc Queries
  • SQream Cross-Joins
  • SQream for External Table
  • SQream Uploader
  • LDAP Authentication for Business Use
  • SQream for Cloud
  • Encryption at Rest
  • TLS 1.3
  • Three Nines Uptime Availability
  • Role-based Access Control
  • SQream Rest Support
  • SQream HA
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