Government Agency Gains Network Edge Visibility to Manage Co-Lo and Office 365 Rollouts

Customer Profile

This government agency's organizational commitment to providing high-quality services to support the country’s citizens and visitors requires the collective efforts of thousands of dedicated employees and a sophisticated information technology (IT) environment. This hybrid environment includes:

• A vendor-agnostic multi-cloud services environment, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud
• Expanding use of Co-located (Co-lo) data center hosting facilities
• Thousands of remote service locations
• Web, digital, and cloud-based applications widely used by customers and employees alike

In regularly enhancing this business service environment, the agency engages in ongoing digital transformation and data center migration projects to improve agency performance for its citizens.

For many years, IT leadership has relied on its business partner, NETSCOUT®, to provide the end-to-end visibility and real-time monitoring required to support optimal performance of ongoing operations and technical expansion of the service delivery network.

The Challenge

In the months immediately preceding COVID‑19’s arrival, the agency’s ongoing digital transformation projects included:

• Rolling out a cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 service offering 24x7 access to business productivity tools from any employee laptop or device
• Establishing operations at two Equinix Co-lo data centers as they implemented the Microsoft Office 365 service to ensure quality service availability with loadbalancing between the two Co-lo's

From years of experience using NETSCOUT for visibility and real-time monitoring across their environment, IT leadership was fully aware they would be flying bind when it came to real-time monitoring of these new platforms without additional nGenius InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources. As part of this service transformation, ISNG technology would need to support 40G network speeds and provide additional storage sufficient for as-needed packet captures and post-incident troubleshooting.

With a tight schedule for this project, the agency again turned to their NETSCOUT business partners for assistance.

Solution in Action

The agency gained necessary visibility into Office 365 performance and the newly established Equinix service delivery environment by deploying ISNG appliances at the two Co-Lo’s. In configuring the ISNGs along the network edge, the IT team has the visibility to both identify and troubleshoot potential bottlenecks and network traffic handoffs from the Co-lo facilities to internet service providers (ISPs), cloud platforms, and Office 365 services.

With the IT team’s new visibility into the network edge, they were able to use existing nGeniusONE workflows to identify an Office 365 performance issue impacting employee access to Outlook email services. Quickly resolving this issue ensured that their increasingly remote workforce maintained always-available access to Microsoft business productivity resources from their laptops and mobile devices when COVID-19 arrived.

IT also has access to substantial forensic data through deployment of additional ISNG extended storage units (ESUs) configured at the Equinix Co-lo’s.

The Results

This agency’s earlier commitment to digital transformation has enabled them to better respond to heightened customer service demands relating to critical business and financial transactions during COVID-19.

The IT team’s ability to use existing nGeniusONE workflows and new NETSCOUT visibility into the Office 365 and Equinix environment to pinpoint performance issues helped justify their ongoing investment in ISNG technology.

IT leadership also recognizes that NETSCOUT solutions help validate service level agreements in their multi-vendor environment, including Microsoft, Equinix, multiple ISPs, and numerous cloud service providers.