Telenet, an affiliate of Liberty Global and a leading broadband, media, and entertainment company in Belgium, has undergone a remarkable transformation in its approach to data and analytics. Just a decade ago, the company's data landscape was fragmented, with multiple teams - IT, BI, and other data groups - working in silos, struggling to keep up with the growing demands for data-driven insights.
Bert Verheyen, the Product Owner of the Data Platform & Architecture team at Telenet, recalls the challenges they faced: "Five years ago, our company's data platform looked totally different from where we are today. It was very complex to work with, as we had different data teams, BI teams, and platforms that were just spinning and could not cope with the increasing demands of Big Data."
The turning point came when Telenet shifted its focus from reactive reporting to proactive, data-driven decision making. "We started treating data as a project, which we called 'boost topics,'" Bert explains. "We wanted to really boost our stakeholders or business partners with all the data we had."
One of the key initiatives was the "in-home connectivity" project, where Telenet leveraged data from customer devices, such as modems and laptops, to identify and proactively address connectivity issues. By building predictive models and presenting the insights in a simple, traffic light-based dashboard, Telenet was able to empower its customer-facing teams to provide better service and support.
This project was a resounding success, but it also highlighted the need for a more systematic and scalable approach to data product delivery. Bert explains, "Quarter after quarter, they kept coming back, asking for more features and more data. We realized that everything we do with data needs to bring continuous value to the business, or else it has no value."
This realization led Telenet to adopt a 'data as a product' strategy, where each data solution is treated as a product with a defined roadmap, lifecycle, and end-to-end ownership. "We make sure that every data product we have - whether it's a data set, an AI product, or a set of reporting dashboards - always has an end-to-end ownership," Bert says. "This ensures transparency and accountability, and allows us to continuously improve and adapt our data products to the evolving needs of the business."
To support this data-as-a-product approach, Telenet made a strategic decision to migrate its data platform to the cloud, leveraging Snowflake and AWS services. "We fully embraced the cloud a couple of years ago," Bert says. "We're using Snowflake as our data warehouse, and our data pipelines are fully built from scratch with Airflow and dbt."
However, Bert emphasizes that having a modern, cloud-native data platform is just one piece of the puzzle. "Just having a fancy rocket and a data strategy doesn't cut it. You really need to make sure that you know how to fly that rocket, how to make it drive."
Telenet's approach to data product delivery is guided by three key principles: easy, relevant, and famous. Bert explains:
To achieve this, Telenet has centralized its data organization, bringing together a team of highly skilled data engineers, data scientists, and product owners. "We realized that data talent is quite scarce, and we wanted to make sure we use that talent in the most efficient way," Bert says.
The data team works hand-in-hand with business stakeholders to define a clear data strategy and roadmap, ensuring that every data product is aligned with the company's priorities and delivers tangible business value. "We create data stories, where we shine a light on our data products and explain to all the business stakeholders how they're making a difference," Bert explains.
With a growing number of data consumers and an expanding data product portfolio, Telenet recognised the need for a more systematic and secure approach to data access management. "We noticed that people were coming back to us, asking, 'Where can I find this data access? Where can I find that?' And if they found the place to request it, they just asked for everything and hoped for the best," Bert recalls.
This led Telenet to implement a Purpose-Based Access Control model, which goes beyond traditional Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). "For us, 'purpose' is the context, the reason why a person or a group of people needs some data access," Bert explains.
The purpose-based access control model involves three key personas:
This approach ensures that data access is granted based on a clear, documented purpose, and that data owners maintain control over how their data is being used. "It's not only about data access, it's also about tooling access," Bert emphasizes. "Everything the person needs to do their data job."
To implement this purpose-based access control model at scale, Telenet partnered with Raito, a data security platform that integrates with their cloud-based data ecosystem.
"We were using version-based YAMLs and CI/CD pipelines to manage access, which was not user-friendly and not scalable," Bert explains. "We were thinking, 'Do we build something ourselves? Do we buy something?' And then we found Raito, and it just clicked."
Raito's purpose-driven approach aligned perfectly with Telenet's vision of making data products easy, relevant, and famous. "Raito just integrates with our landscape, our new provisioning service, and it helps us manage data access, tooling access, and, most importantly, insights and audit and compliance checks in an efficient way," Bert says.
The three personas in Telenet's purpose-based access control model leverage Raito in the following ways:
Bert emphasizes the benefits of this approach: "For the data consumers, it's a safe and bounded space. The data they have access to is linked to the purpose they need, so there's no risk of breaching ethical walls or GDPR compliance. And for the data owners, they have one place to look at and see which purposes have access to their data, how it's being used, and whether they can improve the data product."
Telenet's journey to break down data silos and democratize access to data products has been a transformative one. By embracing a cloud-native data platform, adopting a data-as-a-product mindset, and implementing purpose-based access controls with Raito, the company has been able to accelerate innovation and drive tangible business value.
"We keep on accelerating, but very in a secure way, together with Raito," Bert says. "Every data product we provide to our business stakeholders, we make sure it's easy, relevant, and famous. We want them to understand it, be capable of embedding it, and see the true value of our data products."
Telenet's story serves as a powerful example of how organizations can transform their data landscape, break down silos, and empower their teams to make data-driven decisions, all while maintaining robust data security and compliance controls. By striking the right balance between data access and data security, Telenet has positioned itself as a leader in the data-driven transformation of the telecom industry.
