European Bank Gains Visibility to Ensure Voice and Data Performance

Customer Profile

This is a leading international commercial bank based in Europe that focuses on both corporate clients and private/small business customers. They offer a comprehensive portfolio of financial services, including

• Retail banking leveraging a substantial branch network
• Innovative on-line banking
• Capital market products
• Foreign trade and transactions

The bank services millions of private and small-business retail customers, more than 50,000 corporate clients worldwide, as well as 5 million on-line users with their on-line banking subsidiaries. To support this substantial customer base, the bank employees 40,000+ employees operating hundreds of branches across dozens of countries, along with facilities for their on-line banking subsidiaries. It is easy to see the importance of the underlying network and technology necessary to maintain the 24 x 7 application service needs of their global employee and customer base.

The Challenge

The major issue facing the IT staff at this bank was protecting performance of key voice and banking application services from the data centers, across their WAN, and out to their branches where slowdowns and disruptions negatively impact their customers. Bank teller applications are expected to be delivered seamlessly to the banks, as they supported their customers’ time-sensitive savings, checking, loan, and mortgage transactions. The bank also prioritized voice traffic, given the high volume of customer and internal calls generated every day. Performance degradations in any of these services could slow customer service and shake customer confidence and corporate reputation.

The bank was a long-time user of NETSCOUT solutions, and with several network digital transformations occurring, they had the opportunity to evaluate the existing deployment and determine the best steps for visibility and service assurance going forward. In addition to the current needs, the IT team wanted to ensure as they continued with some other strategic initiatives (e.g., moving some services to a co-lo site, increasing their Citrix footprint, upgrading segments to 10 GB, and expanding their virtualized server adoption) that the service assurance solution they decided on today would provide them with single pane of glass views and analysis into the future.

Solution in Action

The recent 10 GB network upgrade in their data center was carrying substantial amount of critical traffic from the branches to appropriate application servers and the Network Operations (NetOps) team wanted visibility to stay ahead of emerging issues. The cost-effective NETSCOUT Qualified InfiniStreamNG Software appliance was going to enable visibility into both their business data applications and their network voice traffic. The NetOps and Voice teams have collaborated to set up nGeniusONE workspaces to display key VoIP traffic metrics, including packet loss, jitter, latency, and degraded MOS. Members of the Voice team have privileges to review the metrics in nGeniusONE and when issues are uncovered, they work with NetOps to troubleshoot, using contextual workflows to pinpoint the source of the issue along the call path. This is achieving quick resolution of issues so voice calls to the branches and to customers are of the highest quality.

To address the blind spot in their virtualized servers, the bank has also deployed the vSTREAM virtual appliances on their KVM hypervisors to provide much-needed visibility into the east-west application traffic flows. The NetOps team is now better equipped to rollout new services in this environment, using the enhanced NETSCOUT solution to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues that may arise.

The Results

There are several financial benefits that bank has experienced with NETSCOUT as a technology partner. First, they have realized cost efficiencies using nGeniusONE to proactively monitor all their banking data applications as well as voice applications with a single-pane-of-glass view. Where other alternatives would require multiple vendors and tools that are costly and add management complexity, NETSCOUT provides them seamlessly in the inclusive nGeniusONE solution. The instrumentation they are using has also evolved over the years to provide cost-effective visibility into virtualized environments, as well as the ability to acquire InfiniStreamNG software for installation on a qualified COTS appliance that was more budget friendly for the bank. Thus, resourcing a single vendor in NETSCOUT for all their visibility requirements is more cost-effective from both vendor management and ongoing maintenance perspectives, as well.

Finally, their NetOps and Voice teams are collaborating at a higher level, with nGeniusONE access privileges enabling the Voice team to proactively view performance to spot anomalies, errors, and slowdowns as they occur. The bank’s user community benefits from enhanced performance, with NetOps and Voice subject matter experts teaming to pinpoint root cause before the issues become debilitating.

For a business that has money flowing through the networks, visibility to ensure safe, responsive voice and data application performance is essential. This bank is achieving that with visibility from NETSCOUT.