LIMA Data Retention, a customer use case

Our customers are faced with a legal obligation to facilitate in data retention with a reasonable response time (Service operators)  or, on the other end, challenged with doing analytics on criminal activities (governmental agencies). For these customers, we have deployed LIMA data retention solutions covering the service provider network or in governmental cases covering multiple service providers to have nationwide coverage with one single point (Umbrella) management.

The challenges that lawful authorities are facing is that they need data to do analytics based on specific parameters like MSISDN (Phone number), IMEI(phone serial), IMSI (SIM card serial), cell tower, address, IP, etc. that they have recovered from investigations or other investigation/ analytics.

Of course, it is, in most situations, necessary to obtain a permittance from a judge or prosecutor and the administration of all actions. Next to that, all underlying documentation should be administered, and all actions audited properly.

For Governmental agencies, the primary goal of deploying a data retention solution is to give the analysts and investigators a method to obtain valuable information from the networks in a fast and accurate method. The main benefit of having nationwide coverage with Data Retention over multiple service providers is that for the operators/analysts, the method for querying and retrieving information and the results are uniform over all the networks. All information from the networks are normalized before storing it in the database for querying, and therefore the user does not need to think about number formats (national/international) and other deviations on the technical level. The information retrieved, however, is in the format as it has been reported by the service provider. Since the data will be stored at the service provider premises and the interconnect is only utilized for actual queries, the required bandwidth is limited. Due to the secure nature of the data and interconnects, this is a very efficient way of utilizing the interconnects with the service providers.

For Service providers, the primary goal of deploying a LIMA data retention solution is to meet the legal obligation as it is in place in a lot of countries. This way, we can minimize the effort for the service provider and help him to fulfill the often challenging response criteria from the SLA. Since the system has been designed for query responsiveness, our clients end up being top of the class when it comes to response times of queries. We can also help to build country-specific interfaces if needed to obey to law/specifications in specific countries and therefore help our customers to do the work with the least amount of effort.

Since the graphical interface is based on the same environment as other Group2000 solutions like LIMA Lawful Interception and LIMA Location Based Services, it is possible to use the same interface with tasking, auditing, reporting, etc, to fulfill the technical part of several legal obligations on a single platform with the same user and role management. Underlying documentation can be stored in this platform to have all information available in the same place in a secure manner.

www.datarentention.com | www.lawfulintercept.com