European-based, Multi-national Global Investment Bank Expands Service Assurance with nGeniusONE Migration
Highlights
- New state-of-the-art network in operation for a few years
- Growth in business, applications, traffic, and services led to reassessment of network services
- Saw strategic opportunity for more automated analysis and enhanced visibility into applications
- nGeniusONE® Server and several InfiniStreamNG™ appliances for the data centers
- nGenius® for Flows with nGenius Collectors for NetFlow from the branches
- Utilizing new views to speed root cause analysis and reduce troubleshooting time with Service Dependency Map and Grid
- Optimize the business and ensure availability of corporate services to the branch offices with visibility and analysis into application services like Citrix through innovative ASI technology
- Achieve lower MTTR when diagnosing customer-impacting application slowdowns
- Ensure service performance for highest quality end-user experience
Customer Profile
This European-based, global investment bank provides financial advice and solutions to individual investors and corporate clients around the world. In offices across 52 countries, nearly 60,000 employees support clients with expert counsel and creative financial investment opportunities in banking and capital markets, equities, foreign exchanges, precious metals, and tailored fixed-income services. Their sophisticated IT infrastructure used to support these financial services is segmented across four geographic areas, with multiple data centers in each region. When it comes to their network, availability and speed mean everything!
Business Challenge
A few years ago, this financial investment firm implemented a new, next-generation network to support their investment services around the world. The IT architects and network engineering teams had the foresight to implement TruView™ for network performance management from the very start to ensure network availability and reduce time to pinpoint disruptions in access to the valuable services. The ease-of-use when using TruView led to successes in identifying when the network, servers, or applications had issues impacting the performance or availability of services, enabling the appropriate teams to address the issues as necessary.
Since the new data centers and network were introduced, the investment bank’s business has continued to grow exponentially. And the success of the firm has been measured, not just in increased customers and assets under management, but also in dramatic growth in customer-facing applications, traffic utilization, and bandwidth demand from the remote branch offices to the data centers. While this is all good for the business bottom line, it comes with added risk, as this growth has increased the complexity, vendors, and potential for disruptions in the network, as well. As the firm evaluated its performance management strategy, it saw an opportunity to advance its service assurance capabilities.
NETSCOUT Solution
After careful review, this long-term NETSCOUT® partner recognized the best solution to take them into the future was the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform. As the basis of a comprehensive visibility and service assurance solution going forward, they selected the nGeniusONE Server, several InfiniStreamNG appliances for the data centers, and nGenius for Flows with nGenius Collectors for NetFlow from the branches.
NETSCOUT Solution in Action
The combination of the nGeniusONE platform, nGenius for Flows, InfiniStreamNG appliances, and nGenius Collector was chosen because of the value of patented NETSCOUT Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) and smart analytics. The IT team at the investment bank gains robust, seven-layer analysis with ASI technology, giving them realtime, in-depth knowledge into utilization of over a thousand applications.
The bank’s increased dependency on Citrix, for Web-based access into corporate services for all their employees in remote offices, made the nGeniusONE Citrix Service Monitor capabilities particularly attractive. The bank is tracking utilization, conversations, responsiveness, and errors for the Citrix services, the ICA and HTTPS protocols, and network protocols supporting Citrix (e.g., DNS, DHCP, and LDAP / Active Directory) to assure the overall health of Citrix-enabled services.
The IT staff is also enhancing their overall troubleshooting capabilities with the customizable nGeniusONE Service Dashboards and Service Dependency Maps that are reducing mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) user-impacting problems. New reporting capabilities in the Grid views are improving overall IT collaboration and informing key stakeholders of service performance throughout their enterprise.
Business Value
In this technology refresh, the investment bank is broadening their visibility to full, in-depth, seven-layer analysis with the addition of the nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to their portfolio. ASI technology takes wire traffic and converts it into smart data, which helps the IT team to see deeper into key application services, like Citrix. When financial advisors in remote branches worldwide have trouble accessing corporate resources, they can’t conduct business – customers and revenue will suffer. nGeniusONE is helping the IT staff pinpoint the source of slowdowns and eliminating the time lost in vendor finger pointing. In a network that depends on speed of financial activities, the value of achieving a lower MTTR cannot be understated!
With the critical insights gained, IT is continuing their commitment to strategically operating their network with the latest available technology, including the service assurance requirements. Keeping up with the demands of the business and the increases in traffic, users, applications and locations is achievable with the implementation of the nGeniusONE platform. IT is elevating their service performance and optimizing costs, while simultaneously ensuring the highest quality user experience.
