Meeting CIO Requirements for Enhanced eBanking Visibility and Security

Customer Profile

This Asian financial services leader has achieved global recognition for their retail, corporate, and investment banking products. 

Executive leadership’s adoption of digital financial technology (fintech) innovations enhanced their business operations efficiency, reduced risk, eased regulatory evidentiary compliance, and helped expand eBanking offerings to their millions of customers during the global pandemic. 

The Challenge

While these fintech innovations had successfully enhanced both client satisfaction and revenue, the bank’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) had several top-of-mind concerns associated with ongoing data center operations and digital transformations, including: 

• Improving visibility, security, and real-time monitoring of Internet and Mobile eBanking applications that were increasingly used by millions of customers for their transactions 
• Successfully and securely migrating certain on-premises data center operations and application workloads to a private cloud environment 
• Maximizing metadata-based analytics to improve Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) productivity and collaboration 

While the bank had vendor tools for network performance monitoring and packet broker functionality, those solutions were neither integrated, nor equipped to support the CIO’s near-term initiatives. As a result, the CIO and information technology (IT) leadership team began evaluating other technology solutions equipped to address their strategic and tactical digital transformation and security requirements. 

Solution in Action

Thanks to the efforts of the CIO and the collective SecOps/NetOps teams, the bank transitioned to an integrated NETSCOUT solution that leveraged: 

• nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform to provide real-time “single pane of glass” views into application, network, and business services delivery across the data center and private cloud environments necessary for proactive management of user experience quality, as well as executive-level reporting, troubleshooting, and trend analysis. 
• NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) software appliances deployed at two data centers to support 40GB network speeds. The ISNG appliances use patented Adaptive Service Intelligence® (ASI) technology to generate the NETSCOUT smart data required for continuous and uniform visibility across the bank’s on-premises data center and private cloud environments. The nGeniusONE platform’s smart analytics consume this smart data to supply the IT team with real-time analysis required for proactive monitoring of both their eBanking and core banking applications, as well as business service workloads that have been migrated to the private cloud. 
• The software-based nGenius PFOS for Certified 5000 Series Packet Flow Switches (PFS) are widely deployed at two data centers, which enabled the SecOps team to support in-line bypass taps that both enhanced operational security and simplified their data center security management. The NETSCOUT PFS solution supports 40GB network speeds and optimized the flow of packets from the bank’s network to ISNG appliances and downstream third-party security tools. 

The CIO’s goals for improving visibility, performance, and security of the bank’s expanded application, network, cloud, business services, and threat landscape environment were realized by leveraging smart data, the foundation of nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, which provided universal metadata generated in real-time from the institution’s network packet traffic to source real-time analytics for both NetOps and SecOps. With this approach, the IT Operations team directed traffic for security and performance management from its on-premises and private cloud environments to offer cross-platform and cross-discipline views across the business. 

Regardless of IT Operations responsibility area, nGeniusONE provided easy-to-use analytical workflows, access to universal NETSCOUT smart data, and customizable Service Monitor and Service Dashboard views that fostered cross-team NetOps and SecOps use and increased adoption across the bank’s business. 

The Results

With their investment in the NETSCOUT, the institution was able to keep pace with their increased eBanking business, while assuring high-quality end-user experience for customers relying on secure, successful transactions from their Web browsers and mobile devices. 

In addition to meeting the CIO’s business, technology, and security aspirations, there was the added benefit of increased organizational collaboration between NetOps and SecOps, which maximized relevance of production-level nGeniusONE analysis and NETSCOUT smart visibility across the bank’s IT Operations environment. 

The company also optimized expense controls and increased IT efficiencies by moving to a single-vendor solution that met emerging NetOps and SecOps requirements.