Case Study

Financial Services Leader Improves Business Delivery with NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service Program

Financial Services Leader Improves Business Delivery with NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service Program

Highlights

The Challenge
  • IT understaffed and overcommitted
  • Needed quick time to knowledge to diagnose issues involving 3rd party providers
The Solution
  • NETSCOUT® Visibility as a Service (VaaS) subscription
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
  • InfiniStreamNG™ appliance
The Results
  • Quick solution to IT staffing concerns, with 100% troubleshooting accuracy leading to MTTR reductions
  • Extends return on investment provided by installed NETSCOUT platform

Customer Profile

This global financial services company offers a vast portfolio of consulting services and software solutions supporting both commercial and personal-business customers.

Wanting to provide customers several ways to use their financial services expertise, the company is taking full advantage of a digital platform portfolio that includes Web and mobile applications. The company’s Contact Centers deliver next-generation voice and video services that are crucial to supporting the business. In addition, their information technology (IT) team operates traditional data centers to help keep the financial business running at the company’s hundreds of remote locations.

The Challenge

For any financial services business, staffing shortfalls during high-traffic annual tax filing periods are scenarios to be avoided. These situations become especially acute when departments occasionally find themselves short of in-demand subject matter experts.

Such was the case with this company’s Network Operations (NetOps) team, which relied on the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for business services monitoring and performance management. In a four-year span, staff promotions, transfers, departures, and even vacation schedules impacted in-place nGeniusONE subject matter expertise. In helping counter-act their nGeniusONE subject matter expert (SME) staffing gaps, the NetOps team had already engaged NETSCOUT for regularly scheduled nGeniusONE knowledge transfer sessions. Despite these efforts, NetOps was still short-handed, and further, the team felt strongly that other IT teams across the business would benefit from use of nGeniusONE’s end-to-end views and real-time business service monitoring.

In addition to these changes, the company’s technology landscape was getting more complex, now involving third-party providers and cloud delivery platforms that occasionally experienced performance anomalies that NetOps needed to triage. Complexity abounded, requiring minor customization of dashboards and rapid triage to analyze a business processing application that was not performing at expected levels.

With these collective issues occurring at a crucial time in their financial calendar, NetOps needed to find an innovative way to maximize the use, and extend the value, of the nGeniusONE platform to monitor and analyze this and other new applications that were regularly added by the company’s business units.

Solution in Action

The company is enhancing business service reliability and improving nGeniusONE troubleshooting effectiveness by selecting the NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service (VaaS) offering.

The company is using NETSCOUT’s delivery of remote nGeniusONE proactive monitoring, with a global VaaS team comprised of application and network experts leveraging proven business practices to maximize troubleshooting effectiveness across the business. These fully trained nGeniusONE SMEs were able to immediately show value to the IT business with their abilities to build dashboard views, evaluate service dependency maps, and design logical troubleshooting workflows to quickly ascertain the source of the application processing delays. Within a short time, they had followed the investigation from the dashboard and service monitors to the session analysis views to pinpoint the need for a packet capture to evaluate error details. This pointed to a problem in the vendor’s network, causing the application to reset multiple times a day. Armed with the details, the vendor was able to rectify the issue, restoring the financial services company to quality experience for the customers.

With this subscription service, the VaaS team helps collect, organize, and analyze the company’s application and network performance data in order to provide monthly utilization summary, performance benchmarks, trending, and consultative meetings with recommendations for improvements. If issues arise, the VaaS team provides troubleshooting expertise that reduces the mean-time-to-know (MTTK) and accelerate mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

The Results

The company’s decision to allow NETSCOUT to commence the engagement onsite enabled the VaaS to be started easily and quickly, with this just-in-time rollout coinciding with the height of the financial filing season. From a financial bottom-line perspective, the VaaS program enabled the company to save expenses and time traditionally associated with recruiting, hiring, and training new IT personnel with highly specialized nGeniusONE, network monitoring, and packet decode expertise.

The NETSCOUT VaaS team has gained a granular understanding of nGeniusONE deployment within the company’s infrastructure and has built a rapport with the NetOps team. That business partnership offered further dividends when it came time to review the third-party business processing application that had been prone to sporadic resets.

The company is also maximizing the value of existing investment in nGeniusONE and ISNG technology, with VaaS SMEs providing effective network, application, and business service troubleshooting leveraging the existing NETSCOUT footprint.

NETSCOUT further demonstrated their commitment as a flexible and valued vendor partner in adopting processes to maintain the company’s privacy compliance requirements. As a result, IT leadership increased their perception of NETSCOUT’s strategic relevance to the company.