The need to find the balance between providing a unique and tailored customer experience, ensuring data privacy, and adhering to market regulations has become more critical than ever for Communications Service Providers (CSPs). In a world where customers are more demanding, regulations are more stringent, and attacks are more sophisticated, it’s easy to see how telecom organisations deem balancing act challenging.
CSPs are navigating a rapidly evolving technological landscape, threatening to erode their margins. One example is the Telecoms (Security) Bill (TSB) in 2020, which imposed new regulatory requirements, and increased compliance costs for CSPs, cting The Telecoms (Security) Bill (TSB), for example, was published in 2020 as a response to the rapid escalation in the cyber threat landscape and sophisticated attacks targeting the country’s critical national infrastructure.
This blog series aims to dissect these challenges and shed light on the path towards sustained operational efficiency and innovation.
What’s the Hold-Up?
Telecom organisations are concerned to find themselves struggling with many, if not all, of the above challenges, considering the ease with which customers today can ‘vote with their feet’ and leave when their contract is up. Maintaining their loyalty means getting closer to customers, but there are yet more hurdles to navigate here.
- A Lack of a Single, Comprehensive View of a Customer: with system upon system siloing customer data, telecom firms are prevented from taking concrete actions to decrease churn and increase loyalty.
- The Need for Adequate Data Protection and Access Control: there are many reasons telecom organisations would need to share customer data, be that because of increasingly stringent governmental regulations requiring them to, or to generate additional sources of revenue by sharing with third parties. An inability to keep data safe wherever it resides prevents additional revenue and can actually result in higher costs.
- Reliance on Legacy Methods of Data Protection: these comprise mostly of network and perimeter firewalls, systems-based native security and basic access authorisation silos, increasingly puts telecom companies in a vulnerable position. Telecoms today need more robust security solutions that can protect the data itself without compromising its value.
It’s a race against time to avoid being disrupted and instead, emerge as leaders in an industry undergoing significant transformation. Telecom organisations that take a holistic approach to data protection are solving these challenges and staying ahead of their competition in this ever-changing landscape.
In the meantime, check out our solutions and keep a look out for the next blog where we will be delving into data management opportunities for telecoms.