Partner content: Reducing spend on lawful intelligence technologies is a strategic necessity for law enforcement agencies and communication service providers globally
The division of financial responsibility between these parties for mediation, location-based services, and monitoring centers varies among jurisdictions. This funding depends on factors such as regulatory frameworks and the specific funding mechanisms of the agencies involved.
Often, communication service providers (CSPs) must provide end-to-end capabilities to track and intercept devices, hand that information over to investigators, and provide the analytics engines to unlock its value, including combining it with other information sources. In multi-operator environments, initial and ongoing investments tend to be duplicated among CSPs. Likewise, this solution sprawl increases the complexity of the lawful intelligence environment for law enforcement agencies (LEAs).Â
Regardless of the funding model, these factors tend to cause total cost of ownership (TCO) to rise for both CSPs and LEAs. SS8’s ongoing initiative for reducing the TCO of cutting-edge lawful intelligence includes multiple cost benefits associated with providing a single solution, end-to-end, backed by 25 years of industry experience all over the world. The initiative spans many dimensions, with value to both types of organizations; other examples of this effort include:
- Improving efficiency of investigator workflows. Capabilities such as recursive identity lookup and data fusion help analysts more quickly find hidden patterns and trends to increase overall efficiency.
- Reducing bloat of intercepted data. Data engineering filters out irrelevant traffic such as real-time entertainment content to reduce transmission and retention costs and further streamline analysis.
- Lowering the cost of change. Streamlining compliance with new mandates such as stricter evidence preservation and warrant management requirements helps lower implementation and operating costs.
An end-to-end lawful intelligence solution builds on these TCO-reduction opportunities by avoiding waste and improving both initial and ongoing cost profiles. Key aspects of that cost reduction are outlined in the remainder of this article.
Pooling Solutions and License Costs
The common case where each CSP in a service area purchases an end-to-end solution to meet their lawful intelligence obligations is inherently inefficient. In this scenario, each provider can be responsible for software licensing costs as well as the associated maintenance and support. Alternatively, that spend can be consolidated and shared among the CSPs, a benefit that is also present under other funding models where expenses are shared among various parties including CSPs, LEAs, and government entities. Consolidating the pool of money to purchase a single solution and support agreement flattens TCO for all parties concerned.
Reducing the Requirements and Expense for Monitoring Centers
Beyond acquisition costs, expenses associated with implementing lawful intelligence grow with the number of solutions involved. In the multi-vendor case described above, a separate monitoring center must typically be maintained for each solution, even when the monitoring and analysis are co-located in a single physical location. This reality compounds the wasteful duplication of resources that arises from disconnected acquisition by various parties. Joint procurement and implementation of a single platform eliminates that duplication for reduced spend and improved TCO.
Cutting Back on Integration Complexity
Integrating multiple lawful and location intelligence solutions together presents a key pain point for LEAs and other agencies. Initial and ongoing engineering effort to ensure that the whole environment works as a coherent whole generates substantial labor costs. Increased troubleshooting and break-fix requirements also interfere with broader strategic initiatives, diverting network engineering resources from that more valuable work. As projects arise aligned with technology requirements such as improved support for 5G and beyond, the importance of this factor grows, and it may also interfere with regulatory requirements.
Stripping Out Overhead for LEA Analysts
Day-to-day operations in monitoring centers become unwieldy when analysts must swivel among multiple interfaces. The cumbersome nature of working in that environment is often compounded by the need for analysts to manually correlate the information provided by all of the tools in use. That inefficiency increases costs as well as the incidence of human error that can compromise investigations. Moreover, agencies must train monitoring center personnel on multiple platforms, with implications for operating costs and distracting analysts from their core duties. Enabling those personnel to focus on a single, end-to-end lawful intelligence environment improves those outcomes.
Lowering Security and Costs and Power Consumption
Operating overhead for lawful intelligence extends to the fundamental costs to keep the lights on. Separate security is required for each solution instance and connection, including firewalls, IPsec, and VLANs. All those security functions must be managed and maintained on an ongoing basis. At the same time, a converged platform reduces the number of racks and systems needed, which cuts down on power and cooling requirements for lower energy costs and a boost to sustainability initiatives. Evolving lawful intelligence infrastructure with a streamlined, single-vendor solution drives law enforcement and intelligence missions forward, with higher efficiency and greater success.Â
About the authorÂ
Rory Quann is a Senior Solutions Engineer specializing in End-to-End Government Solutions at SS8 Networks and brings with him over 14 years of experience in the Lawful Interception and Data Analysis industry. Prior to joining SS8 in 2013, Rory worked for BAE System Applied Intelligence where he was focused on large scale Government deployments of Intelligence Solutions. Rory has held multiple positions in the Lawful Intelligence space ranging from Deployment Engineer, System Consultant, and Sales Engineer focusing on Country-wide Passive deployments. Rory is a Certified Microsoft MCSA Engineer and EMC Certified deployment Engineer. You can learn more about Rory on his LinkedIn profile by clicking here.
About SS8 Networks
As a leader in Lawful and Location Intelligence, SS8 helps make societies safer. Our commitment is to extract, analyze, and visualize the critical intelligence that gives law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and emergency services the real-time insights that help save lives. Our high performance, flexible, and future-proof solutions also enable mobile network operators to achieve regulatory compliance with minimum disruption, time, and cost. SS8 is trusted by the largest government agencies, communications providers, and systems integrators globally.
Intellego® XT monitoring and data analytics portfolio is optimized for Law Enforcement Agencies to capture, analyze, and visualize complex data sets for real-time investigative intelligence.
LocationWise delivers the highest audited network location accuracy worldwide, providing active and passive location intelligence for emergency services, law enforcement, and mobile network operators.
Xcipio® mediation platform meets the demands of lawful intercept in any network type and provides the ability to transcode (convert) between lawful intercept handover versions and standard families.
To learn more, contact us at info@ss8.com.