Managing Financial Services Business Delivery with Software-Based Smart Visibility

Customer Profile

This Midwest U.S. financial services company is experiencing robust business growth linked to their efforts in selling diverse investment and policy options to customers across the country. 

The company’s recent success is a direct result of the efforts of thousands of corporate employees and field associates based at nearly 2,000 agency locations. 

The company’s enterprise monitoring solutions have for years depended on NETSCOUT analytics platforms and data sources. 

The Challenge

The company’s expanded use of remote business locations and digital platforms has transformed the service delivery challenges facing their information technology (IT) team’s leadership. These challenges include: 

• Expanding visibility needs: With the company’s growth, there were additional users in remote corporate facilities, legal firms, home offices, and even a few high-end customer sites depending on reliable business service delivery. IT needed to instrument these locations with data sources required for gaining the across-the-business visibility they lacked. 
• Enhancing application performance monitoring: The health of the business relies on a suite of internally developed, on-premise applications (e.g., personal and claims apps, claims management system), as well as those running on Web (e.g., agent sales quoting portal) and Unified Communications (e.g., Microsoft Skype) platforms. 
• Managing network bandwidth utilization: After a recent network upgrade targeted at addressing remote user’s performance complaints, the IT team wanted tools that would differentiate bandwidth issues from those linked to other multi-service delivery elements. 
• Improving IT performance monitoring consistency: The company’s service assurance champion wanted his IT peers to realize more return on investment from their monitoring platform – meaning more teams and users accessing a common data source and business analytics offered by service dashboards and monitors, rather that post-incident packet capture cycles. With staff augmentation not an option, the company sought third-party vendor expertise to assist with this important initiative. 

With cost containment a strong consideration in this technology refresh, the company wanted innovative solutions and best-practice recommendations regarding how next-generation approaches could address these IT issues and improve insurance and financial services delivery needed to maintain business growth. 

Solution in Action

The company’s move to a next-generation NETSCOUT Service Assurance solution featuring software and virtual smart data sources is delivering immediate benefits to the IT team and service delivery improvements to end-users and clients alike. These benefits include: 

• Real-time performance monitoring, with nGeniusONE leveraging smart data generated from the company’s east-west and north-south network traffic to effectively visualize, isolate, and diagnose performance issues end-to-end. 
• Improved network traffic management (e.g., filtering, load balancing, aggregating, and replicating) by using NETSCOUT Certified Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) appliances at both their primary and secondary data centers, with this packet broker software also optimizing the flow of network packets to ISNG appliances.
• Reliable business service delivery for remote sites, with IT viewing client-side application performance by deploying the NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE with nPoints solution across their geographically dispersed locations. With this solution, IT can view user experience right down to the agent desktop level, along with higher-level snapshots of key business application and UC performance occurring at regional levels. In addition, this remote visibility can be flexibly deployed on an ad hoc basis to quickly respond to potential issues before they impact business service performance. 
• Expanded UC technology monitoring, with visibility improvements into their Microsoft Skype environment provided by vSTREAM virtual appliances. As a result, the UC team used nGeniusONE to troubleshoot earlier-unexplained performance problems involving server-to-server communications. 
•  Increased IT efficiency using real-time monitoring and troubleshooting workflows, with the nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) program providing NETSCOUT subject matter experts focused on improving the value of nGeniusONE (e.g., building specific nGeniusONE Service Dashboards to monitor relevant user communities, providing recommended practices for enterprise service assurance). 

The Results

The company’s business benefits from the improved customer and end-user experience, as well as enhanced employee productivity realized through the use of NETSCOUT service assurance solutions. 

The company met cost containment guidelines and expanded real-time, remote site monitoring across the business by selecting the NETSCOUT software-based approach, with smart data sources providing visibility into their on-premise, cloud, and virtual platforms. 

With nVaaS, an expanding IT user base is using nGeniusONE to monitor application and business services and setting the stage for reducing vendor toolsets.