On Monday, April 6 a new EU directive on electronic communications comes into force. The Data Retention Regulations 2009 will see ISP’s enforced to store key data for 12 months concerning all emails sent and received.
The law won’t see the exact content of emails stored – only details such as IP address, date, time and user telephone number will be saved.
While this regulation has far reaching security implications there is also a cost and time management issue to consider, as ISP’s will have to store all emails, including spam.
Comment
“Quite clearly, this new legislation opens up a whole can of worms for the ISPs when it comes to potential security implications. Considering the sheer volume of high profile security breaches hitting the headlines in the UK, the protection and storage of data is of paramount importance to an organisation.
There is a plethora of questions that need to be considered with the introduction of this regulation, such as who has access to the data? Is that data logged? How is the data logged? And what guarantees are there that data will not be retained past the 12 months? All this must be taken into consideration before any concrete strategies on the storage of this data are implemented.
The cost implications facing the ISPs, in terms of data storage, are probably not as vast as one might first imagine. If you take 1 million users as an example base figure, with three messages being either sent or received, that means six addresses are being stored per day – both sender and receiver. With an approximate 30 bytes per address the ISPs are looking at around 100GB per year, even if you factor in database overhead. Obviously this takes up storage space for the ISPs, but it won’t be a massive drain on their revenue.
In terms of man power and resources that implementing this regulation will require, there is certainly a significant amount of work to be done for the ISPs. The data will need to be pushed into a database, a web tool developed to extract the data, hardware and software licensees to be purchased and the opex cost of running the machines.”
Neil Cook, Head of Technology Services EMEA
Cloudmark
