[Gllug] New EU data retention rules approved

[Jason Clifford]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2005, Anthony Newman wrote:

> When you start dealing with millions of mails a day, the burden 
> obviously increases, but it is still a trivial task to maintain 
> terabytes of logs, and increasingly cheaper. I've just had a quick look 
> at some logs for a platform transmitting just over 2 million mails an 
> average day, and that represents about 100MB of Exim main logs a day. To 
> make a trivial and flippant example, at £100/300GB for cheap disk 
> storage (who's going to waste SCSI on stupid logs the Government told 
> you to keep :-)), that's about £10 for a year's storage (obviously 
> ignoring the machine to plug it into, and the power to run it). Archive 
> it on tapes, and the cost drops further.

Firstly if you have a legal duty to maintain and provide access to the 
logs the cost is far higher as you have to ensure that the data is 
retained with a reasonable guarantee of integrity and have a means of 
accessing the data with variable queries against it.

That means a couple of cheap disks is likely to be insufficient. At the 
very least RAID storage and offline archival are a must. The offline 
storage will need to be fire safe and offsite. That probably means a 
commercial service of some sort.

All of this is expensive and it's all 100% expense over what the ISP would 
have been doing before.

> I'm not arguing for it, as I have enough to do already, but the argument 
> that ISPs are going to crumble under the strain is a little melodramatic.

Not crumble but combined with the new Ofcom requirements it means that 
ISPs, who operate on tiny margins, are facing a massive cost increase. 
Naturally these costs will be passed onto customers so ISPs wont go bust.

Jason
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