Government IT Organization Leverages NETSCOUT to Achieve Critical Strategic & Tactical Service Assurance

Customer Profile

This U.S. Department of Defense organization plays a vital role in protecting the interests of the United States, its Allies and partners. The IT operations organization is tasked with supporting the important overall mission of providing effective governance, improving security, and fostering trans-regional cooperation in order to achieve the vital interests of the country. To meet these strategic goals, the network engineering team works to provide critical network communications for military operations and activities with allies and partners around the world.

Business Challenge

Network engineering teams face the considerable challenge of assuring tactical and strategic communications in a world of mobility and network portability that changes frequently to align to mission objectives. Due to the critical nature of these portable networks, any performance issues or failures threaten to put lives in jeopardy.

For this IT operations organization, local network engineering teams on the ground lacked a single tool for troubleshooting and triaging the network. At the same time, centralized IT teams lacked overall visibility into the health, performance and cybersecurity status of these critically important remote, regional networks. With multiple teams managing the same networks, the risk of “information fratricide” – making conflicting changes to the network from different locations using multiple tools – presented a clear and present danger.

IT’s mission was to ensure networks were protected, available, and performed flawlessly making certain communications were ‘always on’ so the larger mission could be achieved.

NETSCOUT Solution

In order to address its critical network and communications needs, this IT operations organization turned to NETSCOUT®. The nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, along with InfiniStreamNG™ appliances were chosen to proactively collect, organize and transform this high-value wire traffic into “smart data” to ensure security, manage risk, facilitate superior decision making and drive performance of remote network services. nGenius® Packet Flow Switches were also deployed to feed network traffic to the InfiniStreamNG appliances, giving IT the ability to continuously monitor networks and applications to ensure availability and performance. In addition to feeding network traffic to nGeniusONE, they are also using PFS to feed network traffic to an Intrusion Detection System (IDS).

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The nGeniusONE platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances have enabled local IT teams in theater to tactically isolate and troubleshoot complex issues while allowing remote access from centralized teams for strategic, proactive management as part of the greater global network.

The nGeniusONE solution offered IT a services-based dashboard that provided proactive detection and identification of anomalies, which is critically important to achieve service assurance. nGeniusONE delivered a single source view into the performance and health of the network and services allowing IT teams to make coordinated changes and prevent conflicting configuration changes.

In addition, the nGeniusONE solution provided detailed reporting that was used for bandwidth planning to remote locations. When there were issues, the reporting provided a source of truth as to where any bottlenecks took place, including with 3rd party Local Exchange Carriers (LEC) and allowed the IT organization to collaborate with the LECs for a quick resolution, thus ensuring communications were available and performing well.

Business Value

NETSCOUT’s advanced solution has been a game-changer for this government IT operations organization, enhancing cross-team collaboration and providing a flexible, adaptable, and lightweight fly-away approach for monitoring the performance and cybersecurity status of the portable “Network in a Box” deployments around the world. The NETSCOUT solution increased proactive visibility, offering IT teams a single, comprehensive view into global IT services, allowing for the detection and resolution of problems before users could be impacted. Using the services-based dashboard, IT can intuitively drill down to detailed information in order to quickly triage and repair issues that arise, reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

In addition, the NETSCOUT solution enables real-time analysis of problematic sites, poorly performing applications, and specific bandwidth constraints across their complex global footprint - allowing IT to more effectively institute bandwidth planning. NETSCOUT also empowers IT to easily configure autogenerated reports, providing senior leadership and network administrators with true insights into the health of the network.