HP Breathes Fire on Data Retention Problems

May 7, 2007: HP is showing off a new data retention solution for telcos, saying it’s got the goods for those being pressured by governments to join the fight against terrorism, organised crime and drug trafficking.

Telecommunications companies are facing increasing amounts of requests from governments to collect and store data from a variety of sources, creating a data storage headache of epic proportions.

Telco’s are being asked to store data on everything from traditional telephony, VoIP and email to text messaging, internet usage and even services such as call forwarding, waiting and conferencing.

While not required to store content, (a daunting prospect for perhaps even one communication medium) telcos still may be required to log call records or transactions which lead into the billions daily. A prospect that could see storage archives bloom to terabytes of data each year.

HP is nor promising to be the white knight of archiving, bringing in its new Data Retention and Guardian Online (DRAGON) system. The company claims its solution is specifically designed for service providers, is scalable and able to capture the massive volumes of voice and data traffic, store it, and retrieve selected records in “almost real-time”.

With so much data being stored, privacy concerns immediately spring to mind, however, HP reckons it has this angled covered too, proclaiming that the system also has robust security features to protect individual privacy.

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