Case Study

Global Financial Services Company Improves Application Performance and Reduces Downtime

Global Financial Services Company Improves Application Performance and Reduces Downtime

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Ensure service availability and uptime for customers and employees around the clock
  • Business mandate to ensure uptime, availability and performance for critical customer-facing applications such as online banking, brokerage, and small business management
  • Need to pinpoint source of VPN degradation affecting remote employees
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
  • InfiniStream and InfiniStreamNG™ appliances
  • Premium Support Services
The Results
  • Reduced MTTR by isolating VPN issues quickly, speeding resolution of an outage impacting tens of thousands of employees
  • Averted unnecessary downtime by proactively resolving issues before they expand and affect a larger number of employees or customers
  • Improved end-user experience with service assurance based on smart data and smarter analytics

Customer Profile

This community-based financial services company provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, loan and consumer financial services to more than 70 million customers across the US and around the world. With billions of dollars in assets, this financial services company makes customer satisfaction a priority at their more than 5,000 branch locations, thousands of ATM’s, contact centers and via on-line banking and mobile devices.

The Challenge

With a customer base that spans the United States, as well as abroad, IT is under tremendous pressure to ensure service availability and uptime for customers and employees twenty-four hours a day. Should any of the bank’s critical applications such as online banking applications, brokerage applications, or small business management services go down or experience performance issues, the business will be adversely impacted – as these services are essential for supporting customers in their banking and other financial services activities.

Internally, tens of thousands of bank employees are home workers, and depend on the VPN service to access the corporate network. On several occasions, round trip delay and jitter would increase to more than 200 ms for soft phone services and other applications running over the VPN tunnel. Investigating this issue, and countless others, fully occupied IT staff, who spent significant time troubleshooting production impacting application and server issues that didn’t necessarily stem from network issues. Without visibility into the real-time or historical performance of applications and servers, unacceptable delays were introduced into the fault isolation process.

Solution in Action

In order to continuously monitor applications to ensure availability and performance, the bank turned to NETSCOUT®. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, supported by InfiniStream appliances for smart data collection is used to quickly identify, isolate and mitigate critical voice, video, and application service issues before they impacted the business.

One of the most valuable capabilities the nGeniusONE solution brings to the bank’s IT staff is its unique ability to provide insights into network and application performance at the same time, where previously they had to investigate the network and then check OSI layers 4-7 separately. In a single snapshot view, IT staff can now evaluate the health of both applications and the underlying network infrastructure.

NETSCOUT’s premium support services team provided a dedicated resource who created service tiles covering key services and voice protocols based on the bank’s data center areas, including online banking, small business management, brokerage, contact centers, and employee VPN services. With the new service views made possible by nGeniusONE, IT was able to quickly expose trouble spots, including those caused by problems in the employee VPN service. Using the Service Dependency Map, IT could examine the traffic flows for the service. From there, the team could see that traffic was being routed to the wrong datacenter, overloading the equipment there with twice the traffic it was designed to handle. Once the issue was identified, IT was able to re-route the excess traffic back to the datacenter where it was supposed to be sent, reducing the load on the infrastructure and restoring normal service quality.

The Results

NETSCOUT and nGeniusONE have proven invaluable to the bank’s IT team. Since implementing this powerful solution, IT has been able to proactively identify and isolate business critical application issues quickly, reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and speeding resolution of potentially customer impacting service degradations and outages. By proactively averting unnecessary downtime - resolving any issues before they expand and impact a larger number of employees or even customers – the nGeniusONE solution enables IT to dramatically improve the end-user experience.

NETSCOUT’s premium support services team provides invaluable assistance to the bank’s IT team, increasing IT headcount support in a budget effective manner. Having a trained resource on hand to configure dashboards and reports has significantly improved cross team and vendor collaboration.

For this bank, end-to-end application visibility is considered essential for IT to ensure uptime and availability of the most critical services, both internally and externally facing. As a result of this expanded visibility, the IT team is able to mitigate business risk by delivering service assurance for critical business applications, which are essential for online banking, brokerage, and other service delivery – protecting revenue generating activities, as well as the bank’s vital service reputation in a social media savvy world.