Industry-Leading Online Financial Services Company Banks on Actionable Visibility to Deliver Superior Customer Experience

The Challenge

As an iconic online mortgage company - offering a wide range of services, including pre-qualification, real-time quotes, diverse loan options, 24/7 loan application status, and extensive home financing educational tools – ensuring the accessibility, reliability and security of its services is absolutely vital. 

The company needed to optimize application performance and reduce service degradation in a highly complex environment comprised of data centers, co-locations and clouds. This challenge was compounded by the high volume of disparate data being gathered by a collection of siloed monitoring tools used by different IT teams, offering no context and a failure to provide common situational awareness. As a result, the IT organization faced visibility blind spots in the company’s infrastructure, making it problematic to improve performance as well as detect and investigate security issues, all of which dramatically increased risk for the business. 

Without end-to-end visibility, the IT team was unable to solve problems quickly. For a company whose entire go-to-market business model is tied to electronic access, performance, and availability, service disruptions of any type could mean significant loss in revenue, customer confidence, industry reputation, not to mention possible regulatory compliance issues and fines. 

Solution in Action

To address these service assurance challenges, the financial services company turned to NETSCOUT^®. The NETSCOUT solution was viewed as the ideal means for gaining deep visibility across the cloud and on-premises data centers. Also, of critical importance, the solution would allow IT to take control of application performance by investigating the root cause of problems more efficiently and faster. 

NETSCOUT vSTREAM™ and InfiniStreamNG™ software and hardware appliances were deployed throughout the company’s infrastructure, providing continuous monitoring of packet data. In this hybrid cloud environment, NETSCOUT appliances use innovative Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology to transform packet data into smart data. With smart data from NETSCOUT there is no need to parse through and correlate masses of disparate data to gain actionable intelligence. Together with the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, the financial services IT and security teams gain unobstructed visibility and the ability to triage problems across all applications, physical and virtual servers, service enablers, networks and their dependencies. 

The IT organization was able to unlock business agility and increase employee productivity with consistent and precise visibility into application health and performance. They were also able to obtain service level analytics in the context of their network and systems. The NETSCOUT solution was used to continuously monitor a variety of availability, reliability, responsiveness and threat metrics, all from a single pane of glass. And the solution architecture was able to scale to support thousands of employees and over a million clients across on-premises data centers, co-lo’s and clouds.

The NETSCOUT solution was instrumental in affording greater collaboration between NetOps, SecOps, and other IT teams, and improving overall network and service availability. IT also relied on NETSCOUT’s partnerships to further meet critical application performance and security management needs. These NETSCOUT partnerships include: 

• AWS 
• Microsoft Azure 
• VMware (for NSX and VMware Cloud on AWS) 

The Results

The NETSCOUT solution has been an unparalleled success story for this major financial services institution. This is not surprising in light of recent third-party survey results from TechValidate by SurveyMonkey which found more than three out of every four IT organizations say NETSCOUT solutions enable them to confidently deploy and secure applications and services across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. By delivering smart data and smarter analytics that provide true Visibility Without Borders, the solutions enable IT to intelligently pinpoint data, network, session, and application elements that are causing performance problems. It also allows the teams to rapidly uncover and resolve security problems without modifying existing workflows. 

This solution has been instrumental in helping IT ensure a high quality, on-line experience for their customers using key revenue impacting applications, while simultaneously delivering consistency in their performance and security monitoring initiatives. NETSCOUT’s performance and security monitoring technologies offer deep visibility into service stacks, providing an early warning system for IT and SecOps. 

NETSCOUT played a key role in helping this financial services company achieve vital service assurance objectives, which has had a powerful impact on efforts to maintain the organization’s standing as one of the highest rated businesses for customer satisfaction amongst mortgage servicers in the U.S.