South American Financial Manages Data Center Transformation With Improved Network Visibility 

Customer Profile

This leading South American credit union maintains a vast national presence to deliver local banking services in the communities where their 4 million customers reside. As part of this regional delivery commitment, the bank: 

• Operates more than 1,800 local branches 
• Employs 10,000+ associates, 
• Maintains a vast automated teller network 

In helping the bank manage the business services needed to support this delivery network, the information technology (IT) operates three regional data centers. In recent years, this IT team has worked to improve financial service delivery by strategically updating its cybersecurity environment, as well as taking advantage of hybrid cloud and virtual platform efficiencies 

 The Challenge 

The functional limitations in the bank’s long-time network performance management (NPM) tools were creating network visibility challenges that prompted technical demands for improvement from the following IT teams: 

• Development, responsible for Systems performance 
• Services, responsible for IT Governance and Business Continuity functions 
• Infrastructure, responsible for Database, Applications, Network, and Security solutions 

In addition, this legacy NPM technology was not providing the collective IT team with visibility into their local branches necessary for assuring high-quality user experience and efficient financial service delivery. 

Without clear end-to-end visibility, these IT teams were operating without source data essential to baseline network, application, and business service monitoring. In an environment rich with third-party technology elements and the presence of system integrators, these IT teams needed a reliable monitoring, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis solution to differentiate whether a performance issue stemmed from one of their vendor solutions or in the bank’s internal environment. Without that solution, internal IT finger-pointing would only continue. 

Along with these day-to-day challenges, an in-progress Data Center Transformation was requiring additional IT cycles to complete. With this project, the network’s core was being migrated to a next-generation technology, with an additional data center location established and a new IT team now responsible for its performance. 

These collective challenges prompted the bank to identify a need for a scalable, real‑time service assurance solution to replace the deployed NPM tool. Regardless of final vendor selection, the IT team was tasked with identifying how any technically superior, packet-based solution would ease the bank’s efforts to provide evidentiary compliance needed to meet Central Bank regulations governing financial institution performance.

Solution in Action

The bank conducted a rigorous evaluation of industry network and application monitoring solutions before selecting a NETSCOUT Service Assurance platform that complied with the IT team’s preference for open compute solutions. With this solution: 

• nGeniusONE performance analytics operate on a virtual platform operating in the bank’s private cloud environment. 
• NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) software appliances are installed at the network edge to enhance the IT team’s enterprise monitoring capabilities. 

During the evaluation, nGeniusONE’s comprehensive service dashboard and service monitor views were proven to satisfy the diverse business and technical requirements. When compared to other solution approaches limited to Web monitoring, nGeniusONE’s Card Processing and Database Service Monitors provided views distinctly suited for addressing the bank’s transaction processing requirements. The nGeniusONE Universal Monitor provides IT with the flexibility to monitor virtually any commercial or custom application deployed in its environment. As a result, IT quickly customized nGeniusONE real-time analytics views to gain single-pane-of-glass visibility into a suite of key applications and services operating across its environment. 

With the NETSCOUT solution, the IT team is equipped with “before, during, and after” analytical views of activity, performance, and errors that are necessary for assuring that business services moving to new data centers or the hybrid cloud have not been adversely impacted by those transitions. 

The bank is also assuring improve service delivery at its local branches, with the the ISNG appliances monitoring packet-based traffic between the data centers and bank branches, providing visibility into these remote locations that had been historically lacking. 

The Results

Ultimately, it is the bank’s customers and associates who benefit from these improvements, with proactive business service and security monitoring enhancements leading to increasingly reliable execution of financial transactions across the business. 

The bank is also avoiding potentially high fines and reputational damage if compliance with regulatory requirements had not been achieved, with nGeniusONE easing evidentiary compliance activities for both their management and IT teams.