Partner content: Too much focus on the initial price of lawful intelligence platforms can lead to much higher total cost of ownership over time
When purchasing lawful intelligence platforms, it is common to solicit RFIs or RFPs from all kinds of providers – including those who compete on the basis of price. If purchasing teams focus excessively on initial price, however, the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) may be obscured if the technology stack’s features and capabilities are not fit for purpose and scalable.
To overcome the limited functional scope and rigid architecture of low-cost options, many organisations face extensive change orders that threaten the budgets they intended to protect. Over time, commodity-oriented solutions lack future-readiness.
Best of breed
By contrast, SS8 aims to deliver best-of-breed lawful and location intelligence and a platform built for long-term flexibility and TCO. The solution is based on a modular architecture that enables customers to adopt the exact functionality they need immediately and seamlessly add capabilities in the future, like high-accuracy location or advanced data fusion. This approach supports inherent cost advantages when purchasing a full-featured lawful and location intelligence platform, such as:
- Efficiencies in data transmission, retention, and analysis: filtering technologies built into SS8’s monitoring center improve the signal-to-noise ratio in lawful intelligence data, limiting wasted resources.
- Reduced complexity and TCO: SS8’s initiative to improve investigator workflows, reduce data bloat, and lower the cost of implementation and change and our comprehensive, end-to-end platform reduce solution sprawl.
- Commercial opportunities for passive location data: revenue opportunities based on bulk location data can help CSPs recover the costs of deploying location solutions to comply with regulatory mandates.
Over-emphasising initial price
Cost-efficient lawful intelligence solutions must be long-term in their perspective. For example, location services that are accurate enough today may be inadequate in the future, a situation some operators may have faced when the European Parliament recently recommended more stringent emergency caller location criteria.
Platforms should be built for distributed, virtualized 5G networks and the associated explosion of traffic and new applications. The types and volumes of traffic passing over mobile networks today are radically different from those of just a few years ago, and usage models for lawful intelligence must evolve to keep pace.
Static definitions of solution requirements ignore cost-effective scalability. An analysis of an organisation’s lawful intelligence practice must consider the cost to scale up the number of concurrent targets, the bandwidth coming into the system, and the number of analysts using it – and not just gradually over time. Solutions must be able to scale dramatically and instantaneously in the event of a black swan event such as civil unrest or a terrorist attack.
The SS8 platform has a cloud-ready architecture built on Kubernetes explicitly to scale services rapidly and on demand while minimizing cost and operational impact. By contrast, the rigidity common in lower priced solutions leaves them unable to quickly adapt to dynamic circumstances, leading to hidden costs.
SS8 provides the highest level of functionality today, drawing on nearly 25 years of industry leadership to help define the future. As new capabilities emerge, they are engineered into the SS8 platform and seamlessly rolled out to customers.
Long-term cost efficiency
The SS8 lawful and location intelligence platform protects operators’ investment by flexibly absorbing the impacts of change, an advantage that extends to the business relationships SS8 has with its customers. Service costs are modular to match the modular design of the solution, so customers pay only for what they need, when they need it, with a predictable fiscal roadmap for the future. SS8 engineers meet with customers regularly for quarterly business reviews to understand industry challenges and tailor SS8 platform development to meet them.
Different pricing models are available to meet customer requirements, from a capital expenditure model to multi-year budgets, or operational subscription-based projects. As a mobile network operator builds out a new service area, for example, the SS8 solution starts small to accommodate the limited number of subscribers.
Future readiness
With a structured approach that grows with the subscriber base, SS8 is a partner that cost-effectively provides tailored sets of services at every scale, throughout the lifetime of the service.
That total lifecycle approach also exemplifies SS8’s position as the industry’s only end-to-end provider in every aspect of lawful and location intelligence. SS8’s comprehensive scope of technologies and intelligent, tested workflows include everything from industry-leading handset- and network-based location technology to cutting-edge data fusion and analytics.
No other vendor provides SS8’s scope of offerings, and its platform is unparalleled at helping communication service providers and law enforcement prepare for the future of lawful intelligence with advanced, scalable solutions that help protect society.
About the authors
Javier D’Agostino
Javier is the Sales Director for the LATAM region for SS8 and has over 20 years of experience as a sales leader. He is responsible for the company’s strategic expansion into Communication Service Providers and Law Enforcement Agencies (Intelligence and Security). He has a BS in Information System Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of CEMA. To learn more about Javier, view his LinkedIn profile here.
About Rory Quann
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.
