Case Study

Assuring Performance & Availability of Biopharma Services with NETSCOUT

Assuring Performance & Availability of Biopharma Services with NETSCOUT

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Managed services provider needed additional visibility during digital transformation of biopharma services and infrastructure 
  • Requirements for real-time monitoring of IT service platform transitions and new data center services 
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform, with smart analytics 
  • InfiniStreamNG™ appliances and vSTREAM™ virtual appliance, with ASI-generated smart data 
  • nGenius® packet flow switch technology 
The Results
  • Avoided fines and regulatory issues with seamless, uninterrupted network services 
  • Support increased pharma business and R&D efficiencies 

“NETSCOUT solutions offer end-to-end visibility across all service tiers to assure service delivery and a positive end-user experience.” – Biopharma’s IT Services Provider

Customer Profile

This biopharma’s innovative medicines have earned brand-name recognition in the treatment of leukemia, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and various forms of cancer. Their research & development (R&D) team is aligned to advance the company’s oncology, immunoscience, cardiovascular, and fibrotic disease portfolio, with subject matter experts working in several global innovation centers. 

With nearly $25 billion in annual revenue, the company’s growth is fueled by market advances in these therapeutic areas, as well as strategic acquisitions and technology partnerships. 

The Challenge

Managing this biopharma business service environment requires a significant information technology (IT) investment to monitor the underlying platforms and applications employed to support researchers and users across all organizational functions. For this reason, company leadership outsourced networked IT services to a leading managed services provider that offered the combined benefits of global reach and regional data center facilities to the biopharma. 

With the biopharma’s technology landscape requiring frequent changes to accommodate acquisitions, partnerships, and internal growth activities, there is seldom a shortage of new requirements facing the IT provider. In particular, there were near-term needs to monitor services in transition, including: 

  • Custom application performance and dependencies for those apps running on servers being relocated across the enterprise 
  • Monitoring services in transition, including performance of DNS services migrating to a new hosting data center, as well as the applications depending on those DNS services 
  • Office 365 performance in an upgraded 10G network environment 

The IT provider also needed real-time monitoring of network traffic during data center migration activities, as well as network capacity management forecasting required to assess the need for a wide area network (WAN) upgrade. 

The biopharma was a long-term advocate and user of NETSCOUT smart visibility, so as the complexity of the recent business and technology changes evolved, the IT team implemented a plan to roll out additional visibility at enterprise locations that could now benefit from nGenius data source monitoring. 

Solution in Action

Years ago, that IT provider selected the nGeniusONE platform for real-time monitoring across the biopharma business, with NETSCOUT’s solution providing an all-in-one real-time performance assurance solution that has been used to proactively monitor network, application, and Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) services and assist in addressing cybersecurity challenges. That decision continues to yield benefits to the IT provider, as it uses nGeniusONE smart analytics and next-generation NETSCOUT data sources to deliver uninterrupted, high-quality business service across the biopharma organization. 

In bringing necessary visibility into new biopharma locations resulting from a recent acquisition, NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG appliances are being deployed in acquired data center environments and remote offices to: 

  • Support 10, 40, and 100 GbE network speeds 
  • Provide nGeniusONE with the smart data necessary for generating the “single pane of glass” analytics views into network, application, UC, and business service performance at these facilities 
  • Support ongoing network integration by generating smart data (incorporating NetFlow) required for nGeniusONE’s Link Utilization reporting and visualizations into identifying whether there were duplicate IPs involved in the in-progress network integration effort

The IT provider is also deploying additional nGenius packet flow switch (PFS) appliances at these new service locations to: 

  • Streamline the monitoring architecture 
  • Optimize the flow of network packets to ISNG appliances, which then use NETSCOUT Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology to convert those packets into smart data for consumption by nGeniusONE performance analytics 
  • Aggregate, replicate, distribute, and manage the flow of network packets to the Cybersecurity team to support security hardening 

The IT provider is able to assure their biopharma customer that there are no business service disruptions in this frequently changing technical environment, thanks to the continued deep-dive usage of the nGeniusONE platform across the business. NETSCOUT first delivers the required visibility, then the “before, during, and after” monitoring that uniquely provides proof that the network, application, and UC service elements in new data centers and site locations operate as designed and with integrity. 

The Results

There are multiple organizational benefits derived from NETSCOUT’s presence as an ingrained element in the biopharma’s service assurance environment. 

  • For the biopharma, business-critical R&D, communications and collaboration platforms, and applications are always-on, with users benefitting from uninterrupted network service delivery. Reliable R&D and business platform performance equips the biopharma to maintain industry leadership in releasing new, innovative solutions for disease management. 
  • For the IT provider, managed services are provided in compliance with in-place Service Level Agreements, enabling them to better avoid financial penalties, maintain brand quality, and retain the biopharma’s business. 
  • Strategic and tactical IT decision-making can be based on collaboration between the biopharma and the IT provider, with stakeholders from both organizations accessing nGeniusONE Service Dashboard, Monitor, and Report views for granular views of current-state network, application, UC&C, and other business service operations. 
  • Technology partners can be assured their collaborations with the biopharma are conducted with integrity on reliable, secure technology platforms. 

The biopharma’s customers may well receive the ultimate benefit from the company’s optimized information technology performance, as the quality of their lives is improved via accessibility to enhanced and innovative solutions for disease management that could only be developed in an optimized R&D environment.