Financial Services Leader Accelerates Data Center Transformation and Maintains Business Continuity With NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This financial services company focuses on delivering superior, consistent results for long-term investors. As a leading investment management organization, the company maintains regional offices across four continents. 

For years, the company’s information technology (IT) team has capitalized on use of the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and smart visibility approach to satisfactorily address technology challenges in their data center and call center environments. The company relies on such networking technology as Cisco Communications & Collaboration (UC&C), multi-cloud, and Equinix Co-location (Co-lo) facilities to deliver voice, video, and data application services to their user community. 

The Challenge

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic did not delay this company’s data center and digital transformation plans – instead, it escalated them. As a result, the emerging strategic and tactical priorities challenging the IT team included the following: 

• Advancing the final stages of a Data Center Transformation plan, including consolidating the company’s on-premises data centers and, as a result, transitioning other technology platforms and application workloads to additional Equinix Co-lo facilities. 
• Improving financial services delivery and reducing expenses by better leveraging the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) multi-cloud environments, as well as expanding regional customer outreach on Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) and Webex voice/video channels to conduct portfolio reviews and shareholder sessions. 
• Assuring end-user experience to company workers-at-home who were suddenly relying on formerly underutilized virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platforms for business service delivery. 

With a large volume of daily financial transactions conducted across this service delivery environment, it was critically important that IT address these data center transformation and remote workforce challenges without any adverse impact to shareholders interactions with the company. 

Solution in Action

As a long-time user of nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution , the IT team brought needed visibility into this transforming environment by adding NETSCOUT data sources in the following manner: 

• Installing InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances at the new Equinix Co-lo facilities, as NETSCOUT’s technology is the company standard for data sources. These ISNG appliances transform network traffic moving to/from company data centers and the Equinix and multi-cloud environments into smart data for use with nGeniusONE’s application, UC&C, and network analytics. In this manner, the existing nGeniusONE platform was leveraged to monitor application performance before, during, and after the data center migration to assure performance was not adversely impacted and business continuity was maintained. 
• Implementing nGenius 5010 packet flow switch (PFS) appliances in Equinix Co-lo facilities to support 40G network speeds and connections to/from AWS and Azure multi-cloud services and the company’s data center locations. By extending the company’s existing nGenius PFS environment in this manner, IT can continue to leverage a fully meshed packet broker architecture that allows for alternate routes for monitoring traffic in the event of a single PFS failure, thereby further enhancing architectural redundancy. 
• Expanding use of already-deployed vSTREAM virtual appliances to get closer visibility into the application workloads running in AWS and Azure services at the Equinix Co-lo.

In the Cisco environment, the IT team uses this expanded visibility to monitor network handoffs to Webex, which provides IT and Cisco Webex engineers with evidence that can be used for assessing UC&C service quality and troubleshooting. 

In addressing their emerging VPN and Citrix VDI performance challenges, IT was again able to leverage previous NETSCOUT investments, specifically using their contracted Onsite Premium Support Services (PSS) engineer and nGeniusONE platform for new Service Dashboard views into remote user experience and business-critical applications running on VDI. 

The Results

IT was able to lead these successful data center transformation projects without service downtimes or performance issues that would have garnered unwanted attention from the company’s shareholders. 

In addition, the company is more fully realizing financial benefits associated with IT’s extended reliance on NETSCOUT as their sole-source service assurance and enterprise visibility provider. These benefits include: 

• Quality end-user performance – these are expensive, highly scrutinized, executive-level projects that must be executed with precision and expertise. When success depends on visibility, downtime is more than an irritating interruption – it can be revenue killing – which was avoided with NETSCOUT. 
• CapEx and IT efficiencies linked to reducing churn that would otherwise be seen in multi-vendor and -toolset environments for application, UC, and cloud analytics, as well as packet broker platforms. 
• Leveraging earlier investments in nGeniusONE analytics and vSTREAM data sources to assure visibility into AWS and Azure multi-could environments at new Equinix Co-lo facilities, thereby assuring application performance of workloads moving from the company’s data centers. 
• Realizing extended value from previously contracted NETSCOUT PSS resources, with these nGeniusONE subject matter experts quickly leveraging already-deployed data sources to bring visibility into the VPN and VDI environments supporting remote-at-home workers. 

In an emerging remote service delivery environment where financial efficiencies are highly valued by this company’s Chief Information Officer, NETSCOUT’s technology and PSS personnel are distinguished by bringing: 

• End-to-end visibility into the remote VPN/ VDI environments supporting remote-at-home workers, as well as the diverse multi-cloud, Co-lo, and UC&C technology environments required for financial service delivery to the company’s regional shareholders. 
• High-value UC&C performance analytics that can be shared with their service provider Cisco to assure Webex performs to negotiated service level agreements. 
• Enhanced disaster recovery positioning, with planned repurposing of existing company data centers in a primary/secondary configuration, thanks to IT’s reliance on NETSCOUT technology to complete workload migration to Equinix Co-lo’s.