The EU Directive on Data Retention and its Implications for Service Providers

This Frost & Sullivan research service titled The EU Directive on Data Retention and Its Implications for Service Providers offers a comprehensive review of market developments resulting from the EU Directive on Data Retention. This includes profiles of various data retention solutions, followed by a wider multi-stakeholder socio-political and economic analysis. An extensive revision of the level of DRD adoption amongst EU member states is accompanied by an in-depth analysis of vendor solutions, stakeholder mapping, ecosystem of key participants, Porter's five forces analysis and PESTLE analysis as well as estimations of the cost and market size for data retention in Europe. The research highlights the areas for growth and best practices in the market. In addition, data retention linked to the parallel markets is also investigated.

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Market Overview

Data Retention Directive to Impact Telecom Service Providers

Given the rising legislative pressures to retain data for national security purposes as well as the exponential growth in data storage, the need for sophisticated data management solutions has become increasingly crucial to business operations. "The growing demand for data retention (DR) services resulting from legislative requirements provides a significant incentive for market growth," notes the analyst of this research. "Communications service providers and network providers in the EU must deploy data retention systems in order to fulfil the requirements of the national legislation transposing the EU Directive on Data Retention."

Some data retention systems can extend beyond fulfilling legislative obligations as solely analytical tools. Further developments of the DR Directive may result in the coverage of additional sectors. For instance, the extended scope of the EU DR Directive could oblige airlines to store airline records for the purpose of crime prevention, which will result in the growth of the DR market. The healthcare sector is another area of potential expansion for the DR directive. This, for example, could cover mandatory retention of profiles and imaging.

In a majority of cases, service providers will need to finance the deployment of such solutions. This will be very costly. Hence, service providers are continuing to try and influence legislative bodies to decrease the duration of the retention period. This move would enable the cost of deployment to be lowered.

While a number of LEA's are providing subsidies either through transaction-based reimbursements or full payment of deployment, the average cost of the system remains relatively high. "As deployments become more pervasive, the technical challenges are likely to be resolved and correspondingly solution costs are expected to decline by at least 10% per annum," concludes the analyst of this research. "The availability of subsidies will also drive market growth."