Regulations are changing worldwide…

January 6, 2009 on 2:53 pm | By Peder | In Main | No Comments

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to present at the ISS Telestrategies conference on Deep Packet Inspection and Lawful Intercept Technology (http://www.issworldtraining.com/ISS_WASH/).  It was interesting to see how much and how fast this industry is changing.  Regulations are changing worldwide that are driving the demands for new technologies and vendors are rapidly moving towards building those capabilities.  Furthermore, an industry that was heavily positioned for edge technologies sitting on a targeted link are migrating to aggregation points requiring not only performance but changes in the capability sets to appropriately deliver selected data.  As such this has led to segmentation in the deep packet inspection (DPI) market between those delivering what is being called deep packet capture (DPC) versus a broader DPI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_capture). Each of these macro changes are worth a dialog in themselves, however, touching on the impact as a whole raises new questions.

 

As the world has begun to change or update regulations, such as those seen in the European Union with regards to data retention for the support of law enforcement DIRECTIVE 2006/24/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, these are driving significant new changes to the telecom landscape.  The extent of these regulations drives growth of interception technology at pace with the network growth itself.  The expense of these systems as well as the complexity of protection of the privacy of the data gathered is changing the technology requirements unlike what has been seen before.  The big questions this leads to is how fast can compliance be achieved and will this change the landscape of the class of companies that can support this scale of deployments?  Also, what impact will this have on the architecture of the telecom provider’s networks as data collection is not a small issue but core to even how the network could be architected to support such directives?  Will this lead to specific variants of technology, such as the thesis of some of the DPC specific vendors for technology designed exclusively for these directives or will the costs of such a large scale deployment require common infrastructure with the telco gear to drive down CAPEX and OPEX of supporting the directive?

In many ways, more questions than answers but clearly lots of change.

Read More: International Mandates : Changing the Way Law Enforcement Operates