APAC Bank Improves Business Service Delivery By Cutting NetOps Troubleshooting By 50%

Customer Profile

This leading Asian-Pacific (APAC) bank has enjoyed sustained business growth in the last decade by addressing the financial needs of more than 300 million individual and commercial customers. As one of the region’s leading financial institutions, the bank operates more than 30 major branches across the country and processes increased mobile payment transactions for their clients. 

As a long-time NETSCOUT customer, the bank has used nGenius service assurance technology to gain visibility into the performance of their multi-site, redundant data center network. 

The Challenge

A surge in clients’ mobile transactions began taxing the bank’s data center network and application resources. With the need for high-quality business service and availability, these digital apps are at the forefront of the information technology (IT) team’s daily concerns. 

With customers complaining about Web-based payment issues (e.g., webpage latency, slow application performance), IT was increasingly challenged to isolate corresponding service issues and relay status to service desk representatives trying to address customer concerns in real time. For frustrated customers, these delays could lead to more far-reaching, real‑world implications for them, including the inability to pay for food, transportation, or services purchased at the point-of-sale. 

The IT team tried various approaches for solving the performance issues occurring across their mobile and Web payment transactions, including purchasing and deploying a variety of network monitoring tools, all of which were only occasionally detecting and warning of looming performance issues before they impacted customer purchasing activities. 

Digital application performance issues aside, there were other concerns that required the IT team’s attention: 

• The bank’s data center network was expanding, with these new facilities requiring the same levels of visibility and performance monitoring as the current “active/active,” dual-site data center configuration. 
• The bank needed evidence of compliance with regulations defining the country’s government requirements for secure financial operations, including cybersecurity, network, and business performance management technologies. 
• The bank’s executives wanted to meet strategic technology objectives that included updating the network design to support data center transformation initiatives for 10 GB and 40 GB infrastructure upgrades, new virtualization adoption, and cloud migrations. 

These external and internal demands taxed IT staffing resources, and the team knew from experience that deploying more monitoring tools would not address their wide-ranging tactical and strategic requirements. They instead turned their attention to assessing how network traffic and enterprise visibility enhancements could possibly address their IT performance demands in a cost-contained manner. 

Solution in Action

The bank gained the continuous, end-to-end visibility into service performance they lacked by taking advantage of NETSCOUT’s software-based smart visibility and packet flow switch (PFS) solutions to both extend their earlier investment in nGenius technology, while deploying this next-generation network visibility solution on their standardized Dell hardware platforms. The enhanced NETSCOUT footprint has been intrinsically integrated in the enhanced data center environment as follows:

• Software-based packet flow switch (PFS) technology extends NETSCOUT’s smart visibility into the transforming data center environments, including support for 10G and 40G network speeds. This approach allows the bank to install PFX software on their standardized Dell x86 servers, which are then used for de-duplication, packet-slicing and other enhanced packet broker features. This Open Compute Platform (OCP) also supports multiple server locations within the data center, allowing for layering the network design into core and access layers to support the high-speed forwarding of network data. 
• NETSCOUT PFX software operates on the NETSCOUT Qualified ISNG software platform to deliver performance and scaling capabilities needed to process network traffic generated by millions of users using hundreds of applications. 
• This smart visibility configuration generates NETSCOUT smart data for use by the nGeniusONE performance analytics platform already installed in the bank’s Network Operations environment and familiar to the IT team. 

The bank is complying with government regulations regarding redundancy by using the NETSCOUT PFS solution to build a full‑mesh, interconnected, redundant network system for complete traffic access and visibility. 

The Results

Addressing the bank’s wide-ranging business and strategic guidelines in a cost-contained approach was a significant challenge for this IT team. 

By leveraging their long-time business partnership with NETSCOUT, the IT team was able to arrive at a software-based approach that reduced the complexity of the solution required to their visibility demands. This scalable, next-generation solution enables the IT team to deliver the results needed by bank leadership, including: 

• Improved business delivery through troubleshooting efficiencies: the IT team reduced troubleshooting cycles by 50 percent, improving system stability. By ensuring visibility and access to network data anywhere/everywhere, IT reduced cross-team finger-pointing and delivered the efficiencies necessary to reduce mean‑time-to-remediation cycles. 
• Reduced IT spend and tool sprawl: Excessive investment in other monitoring approaches that would not address performance issues was estimated at 70 percent. 
• Leverages earlier IT investments: The NETSCOUT solution leverages their investment in network analysis equipment, as stacking can be used to direct monitored traffic to centrally located analyzers for wider stacking ability. 
• Met government regulatory requirements: This approach is helping the bank meet requirements for secure financial operations, cybersecurity protection, network, and business performance management technologies to avoid risk, reputational damage, and fines.