Financial Leader Improves Business Service Reliability from Data Center, UC, and Hybrid Workforce Technologies

Customer Profile

This holdings company maintains a controlling interest in operations of a global banking institution with nearly 150 million global customers.

The company’s centralized Information Technology (IT) Operations team is tasked with leading digital innovations that operationally benefit both the holdings company and their separate banking institution business operations. In this manner, these business entities benefit from optimized IT operations investments and personnel resources, including sharing certain data center operations.

The Challenge

While taking advantage of centralized IT efficiencies where feasible to support their own technology operations, the holdings company and banking institution have separate network infrastructures, business services, and capital expenditure (CapEx) processes, all of which occasionally prompt sequential, rather than concurrent, adoption of common vendor technology platforms.

For example, IT Operations had ensured the success of the banking institution’s recent data center transformation by deploying a NETSCOUT smart visibility and service assurance solution that included:

• nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform
• Software-based InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances
• nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) software for Certified 7000 Series Packet Brokers

As a result of this same investment, IT operations also addressed work-from-home (WFH) quality of experience issues with Voice over IP (VoIP) services, as well as network connectivity and bandwidth challenges in one remote office location, using synthetic testing into user experience provided by the NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE with nPoint sensors solution.

While this project continued to yield returns on investments (ROI) for the banking institution, IT leadership was seeing very familiar visibility gaps and WFH concerns in the holdings company technology environment also under their management. The challenges for WFH employees included access to, and reliable performance of:

• Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) access for secure business application use.
• Oracle services.
• VoIP and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) service quality, with underperformance from these critical platforms prompting high volumes of user complaints to the corporate Help Desk.

While the Citrix VDI access issue inconvenienced WFH users primarily at the start of the workday, these problems remained largely unresolved, despite in-place vendor troubleshooting toolsets in the holdings company environment. This frustrated both employees and the IT resources tasked with troubleshooting and mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) functions without single-pane visibility into how these solutions operated in home office environments.

Beyond these tactical concerns, IT leadership had to focus on establishing next-generation, on-premises data centers at several company locations. Upon successful deployment, this data center operations network would support nearly 700 holdings company branches and sites, which prompted high executive-level visibility into this project.

IT leadership knew they needed to achieve visibility across the extended data center operations and WFH office environments necessary for effective service assurance across the holding company’s infrastructure environment.

Solution in Action

The IT leadership team again relied on NETSCOUT to ensure this project’s success, taking advantage of the company’s subject matter experts to help design a solution that capitalized on their earlier service assurance technology investments. In this manner, IT leadership recommended a software-based smart visibility approach for the new data centers and use of already-deployed nGeniusONE and nGeniusPULSE analytics (previously purchased by the company’s banking institution), which aligned this project with the cost containment guidelines necessary for go-ahead approval from their Procurement team.

In introducing visibility into their new data center operations environments necessary to assure service performance, IT Operations deployed NETSCOUT Certified ISNG software appliance (with support for 40GB network speeds) and software-based nGenius PFOS Packet Broker technology solutions. The ISNG appliances used integrated Adaptive Service Intelligence technology to generate smart data in real-time from the north-south network packet traffic, which was then employed by IT Operations for improved network, application, and business service delivery across the holdings company business. The nGenius PFOS technology ensures monitored network packets are distributed from any network segment, to ISNG software appliance, as well as other deployed security tools.

With these smart data sources in place, IT Operations used nGeniusONE workflows already proven to troubleshoot Citrix and Oracle performance issues in the banking institution to rectify very similar issues affecting holdings company employees. Similarly, IT Operations knew how to use nGeniusPULSE with nPoints to address the underperforming VoIP and Cisco UCS services in WFH environments, because they already had successfully employed those workflows for the banking institution’s home users.

The Results

Extending the NETSCOUT footprint across the collective companies’ financial operations and remote workforce environments offered numerous benefits to employees and the collective IT team, including:

• Assured the success of high-profile data center operations establishment, with the north-south visibility required for single-pane-of-glass views into service performance on Day 1 of operations.
• Enhanced business continuity for WFH users depending on available access to, and reliable performance of the VoIP, Cisco UCS, Oracle, and Citrix VDI services that were now critical to their customer service delivery success.
• Reduced “IT fatigue” traditionally associated with the all-too-familiar “new project, more tools” scenario by taking advantage of NETSCOUT smart analytics and smart visibility resources that had already delivered results to IT Operations.

For company leadership, perhaps the best measure of the collective NETSCOUT project successes realized across these business units was IT’s capacity to undertake these strategic transformations and tactical challenges in a manner largely unnoticed by clients in a particularly challenging financial service delivery environment.