Financial Services Company Successfully Adds Acquisition to Network

Customer Profile

This North America-based financial services provider with over 10,000 employees, helps millions of customers across multiple business lines plan and manage their financial portfolios. With over a century of experience providing trusted service, the company enjoys a stellar reputation for financial expertise, strength, and delivering value.

The company is growing rapidly through both increases in organic revenue and acquisitions. Executives, including those in IT, are committed to leveraging technology to increase the scalability of the business. Key elements of focus for growth are: the quality of the end user experience, visibility to remote offices, and operational intelligence for quality decision-making.

The Challenge

As the company grew, the upgrades, additions, and expansions of their data centers, contact centers, and remote branches increased the network complexities for the IT teams. The team was relegated to using a combination of legacy tools that were both ineffective and left gaps in visibility. This exposed the organization to the potential for severe issues to arise that could not be resolved before they impacted end-user employees and customers.

IT needed to quickly migrate newly acquired locations to the company standard infrastructure architecture for visibility, consistent processes, and ease of troubleshooting. That infrastructure had to be updated to include the latest management and monitoring technologies.

The addition of many more remote branch locations providing service to their most high-value clients, brought an urgency to ensure and improve access and performance of their access to critical business applications.

Solution in Action

As a long-term user of NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, the IT team relied on NETSCOUT® to quickly upgrade all existing and acquired locations to a new standard infrastructure architecture with the most current technologies. The nGeniusONE platform with software-based InfiniStreamNG and nGenius 5100 Packet Flow Switches (PFS) appliances provided visualization and representation of the network details. At the same time, the company invested in a critical hybrid application with a cloud front-end and on-premise databases and hardware. They used the nGeniusONE service dependency map to architect the deployment to ensure high availability and performance delivery. Due to the complexity of how this multi-tier app relies on performance of the front end of the service in the cloud, and the back end of the database servers in the data center, it is extremely valuable to have nGeniusONE monitoring the overall communication path of the application, across both areas for precision in pinpointing the location of any slowdown or disruption.

nGeniusPULSE hardware nPoints are deployed in Data Centers and at the remote branch locations to monitor the availability and performance of the most critical internal and customer-facing applications. Using nGeniusPULSE tests between the remote locations and servers, the company was able to identify locations where the upgraded bandwidth did not meet the contracted speed. Using the details uncovered in these tests, they were able to collaborate with the local third-party WAN providers to deliver the contracted bandwidth to each location. Other tests run automatically to identify issues with application performance - often before users are impacted.

A NETSCOUT dedicated Remote Site Engineer (RSE) has provided valuable assistance in configuring, deploying, and managing the solutions. The RSE engages with the IT team to isolate and resolve any priority issues, while educating and helping IT implement best-practices.

The Results

The company has reduced Mean-Time-to-Know (MTTK) and Mean-Time to Resolution (MTTR) using contextual workflows to more quickly isolate the problem domain. The nGeniusONE platform with nGeniusPULSE delivers the visibility the company needs to pro-actively monitor their network and applications together with the in-depth data necessary to correct issues.

After identifying the cause of the lack of bandwidth, they are working closely with 3rd party vendors to ensure Service Level Agreements are met and the performance for the end-users in these offices has improved as a result. An added benefit has been that they have better insight for accurate budgeting and planning to analyze bandwidth utilization at the remote locations.

IT now has dashboards with metrics that are relevant to the end-user experience, improving communication between the Network, Security and Application teams, as well as with Executive Management. They have the data they need to make strategic decisions and focus on actions that impact employees and customers, improving the user experience.