Banpará Grows and Adopts NETSCOUT to Ensure Quality of Services

Customer Profile

Banpará, Pará State Bank, is one of the five banks owned by Brazilian states today, and is considered one of the best retail banks in Brazil. It was founded 57 years ago in 1961, and in the last seven of its history has grown more than in the first 50.

In 2011, the bank had 42 branches, and has expanded its branches to all 144 municipalities in the state of Pará by the end of 2018. In the last seven years Banpará more than doubled its asset movements and the value of its loan portfolio increased by more than five times, from 800 million reais to more than four billion.

As a public bank, Banpará’s mission is to foster the development of the State of Pará, the second largest state in the country, covering more than one and a half thousand square kilometers, and possessing a diversified and geographically decentralized economy: 25% is concentrated in the metropolitan region of the capital, Belém, and 75% in the interior of the state.

The Challenge

Significant investment in technology was implicit in such ambitious growth. It is worth remembering the dimensions of Pará, where just one municipality, Altamira, is larger than the entire State of São Paulo, the richest in Brazil.

The few branches the bank had in 2011 relied on communication links of 128k at the most. Today, the bank is present in more than 41 locations in the metropolitan area, where its branches are interconnected by optical fiber. Built in partnership with the State Government data processing company, this network enables data traffic at the rate of 10 gigabits per second and was the first step towards the bank initiatives.

Banpará’s network expanded first to poles on the outskirts of the state capital, and then to the entire state, “which has efficiently increased our capacity and the availability of network communication at lower costs than those provided by local carriers,” notes Eugênio Pessoa, the bank’s Chief Technology Officer.

The new network speed and the quality of its services allowed for the creation of different channel access and new digital services, as well as better communication capabilities, resulting in greater satisfaction for both internal and external customers.

As Banpará became aware of the need to monitor traffic throughout its network, they looked for a proactive monitoring structure able to allow for the identification of service degradations before these situations reached the point of network unavailability, allowing for immediate correction.

The Solution

The bank’s growth and the nature of today’s financial market required technological controls that far surpassed the resources of Banpará’s legacy systems. In order to maintain the availability of the bank‘s services as well as uninterrupted and secure IP communications, Banpará needed to update its infrastructure.

They were in the market for a less reactive and more proactive monitoring structure.

After proof of concept, NETSCOUT was chosen as the best option. Key drivers were NETSCOUT’s technology and its ability to give the bank the necessary support. Banpará has adopted the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform. “[The NETSCOUT solution] is completely able to work with the bank network in a very simple, very easy way. A few months after its implementation, we could already see extraordinary results, “says Eugenio.

While aggregation devices and TAPs ensure full network traffic visibility, NETSCOUT analytics solutions help deliver a comprehensive view of service and application performance, which includes monitoring the entire virtualized environment with vSTREAM - a virtual appliance that extends Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology to virtual and public or private cloud environments.

The nGenius packet flow switch aggregates and directs all network traffic, making it possible to optimize the use of next-generation InfiniStreamNG appliances – which ensure complete control as they capture, order and analyze environments that demand large bandwidth in real-time. All these complex tasks are integrated with nGeniusONE, the analytical module of the solution, where services behavior and performance go through continuous scrutiny to detect deviations and anomalies, preventing downtime and any impact on the bank clients’ routine.

Results

The proactive monitoring that the NETSCOUT solution provides allows the bank to proactively monitor the network, identifying service degradations before a link crashes or a server fails, potentially leading to an outage. These trends can be detected and corrections made before issues occur.

A good example of how the NETSCOUT technology solved the issues Banpará was facing was the Book Fair held in Belém in 2017, when the new solution was being implemented.

Banpará provides the infrastructure for the local Belém Book Fair, one of the largest in Brazil, where about 400,000 people circulate over 10 days. It is the only occasion when teachers and other state civil servants can spend their book purchase allocations.

To make more efficient use of more than 200 POS machines in operation for card payments, Banpará set up a Wi-Fi network instead of using the cellular network, as previously occurred, in an attempt to avoid the recurring problems of cell-line congestion. The result could not have been better: the POS payment system worked perfectly, without requiring manual intervention at any time.

Business Value

Banpará’s Chief Technology Officer believes that the technological upgrade in Banpará, especially concerning network enhancement and monitoring, has significantly contributed to its growth.

So, the more Banpará grows, the greater NETSCOUT’s presence, as it is deemed to provide better service quality and better control of SLAs.