Promoting a trusted telco data space to drive new opportunities

This Catalyst will demonstrate the need for new data-sharing best practices and standards and recommend automated mechanisms to ensure trusted, dynamic end-to-end service assurance. The aim is to enable communication service providers (CSPs) to seize new business opportunities and provide new services to customers. As of now, if someone shares their data there is no guarantee that it remains their data.

The project participants are building a secure data space called Telco Data Space for sharing and processing data among stakeholders while still maintaining sovereignty over the data by each stakeholder. All stakeholders connect to the data space through a unified structural element called the IDS connector.

The companies taking part in this catalyst are Ikanotis Partners, Infosys, IntegraTouch, IoT Lab, Orange, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Vodafone. Orange and Vodafone are the champions and leaders of the Catalyst. They have defined use cases which require a telco data space to allow processing and sharing data within distributed cloud infrastructure with data usage control by the data owner.

Ikanotis specialises in modern cloud data engineering and AI-driven decision making, enabling CSPs to leverage data as an enterprise asset. It supports the Catalyst project with a set of AI-powered models, in line with the TM Forum Big Data Analytics framework and the specific use cases selected by the two champions. In addition, Ikanotis focuses on ways of identifying the commercially sensitive data, flows, and usage restrictions, to ensure trust is installed in the business layer as well as the technology layer.

In terms of the other Catalyst members, IntegraTouch has developed a certified application that enhances a CSP’s business once fed with CSP data, while Infosys provides a trusted and certified data infrastructure. Furthermore, TwinX from TCS is an artificial intelligence platform that uses organizational data, augmented by the knowledge of historical events and context, to run risk-free business simulations via a digital twin-based simulator.

Collaborative approach

According to the champions Vodafone and Orange, the Catalyst will explore how to enable CSPs to more easily collaborate with their peers in order to open up new business opportunities and provide services to customers in multiple markets.

For example, a CSP could support an enterprise in the area of sovereign data exchange and processing within a common framework (the Telco Data Space), enhancing cross-data analytics scenarios and allowing the automation of processes, cost reduction and higher efficiency.

In order to cooperate, CSPs need to be able to share sensitive information between their different OSS/BSS and IT systems within data spaces — a federated cloud infrastructure that allow usage control by data owner for end-to-end service assurance and management.

The European Gaia-X initiative is a data space designed with data sovereignty in mind. The following capabilities and requirements from the Gaia-X initiative are being developed with the solution:

• Sovereign secure exchange and processing of data within a “trusted telco eco-system”;
• Data usage constraints blueprint (who is allowed to do what in which context with the data shared by the data owner);
• Data governance and data control framework compliance with “telco data space catalogue services”;
• Data layer with data-space nodes (connectors) able to enforce data usage constraints policies;
• Certified applications to collect, manage, process data within a trusted distributed environment, orchestrated in connectors.

A TM Forum Open API for data governance, data security and data catalogue services will be developed since it is required to manage telco data space services and enforce data usage policies within the data connector in the TM Forum Big Data Analytics framework.

Federated services catalogue, anonymized data structures and profiles, meta-analysis over larger data structures, and pattern analysis combined with AI are among the best practices for building and leveraging the systems behind this Catalyst.

In summary, the main objective of the two CSP champions is to aggregate data from the different players and to share them within a protected data space to build and offer value-added services to their customers. Examples include roaming, aggregating user data and profile/context information from the domestic and external networks, reducing costs from breaches of service level agreements and increasing the overall quality of experience.

Visit the project space to watch videos, see additional resources and make contact with the team to find out more.