Insurance Leader’s Business Growth and Next-Generation Technology Rollouts Assured by NETSCOUT Real‑time Visibility

Customer Profile

This leading insurance and financial services company has a major business presence, for decades serving millions of customers across the European continent and offering diverse service lines that include:

• Health and life insurance
• Group/supplementary pension and retirement plans
• Personal savings vehicles

The company’s recent financial expansion has been powered by business acquisitions, as well as organic revenue growth derived from sustained sales to commercial, private business, and personal clients.

The Challenge

While robust business growth improved the company’s standing in the European financial marketplace, there were future and near-term challenges facing their collective Information Technology (IT) teams, including:

• Network Management expansion: Post-acquisition, the Network Management team would soon be responsible for delivering high-quality network services supporting critical insurance and financial transactions across more than 400 company sites, including local Contact Centers and cross-continent agency locations.
• New Technology Platforms: The company planned to take advantage of Software Defined Networking (SDN) operating efficiencies by introducing VMware virtualized servers.
• Contact Center and Unified Communications performance issues: Nagging voice slowdowns in the company’s enterprise environment meant the company’s ability to support real-time telephone business with customers was being adversely impacted. These slowdowns were frustrating and, at times, even professionally embarrassing to the agents responsible for first-level communications with customers. With the acquisition, IT would also be responsible for monitoring Cisco SIP trunking environments at hundreds of local contact center and needed visibility into those locations.

The digital transformations the company were undertaking to deliver quality services and interactions with customers had the attention of executives due to the expense, regulations, and reputational impacts.

IT felt there was one common denominator related to addressing these challenges: expanded visibility, which would promote proactive monitoring. Too often, IT resources were forced to employ a reactive troubleshooting approach reliant on user complaints surfacing in order to commence service triage efforts focused on reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) cycles.

With all these collective visibility improvement demands, the company recognized it may be time for a new network solution design that would factor both current and future requirements.

Solution in Action

The company partnered with NETSCOUT to implement a next-generation solution design that takes advantage of a next-generation smart data platform to provide them with the real-time visibility required to proactively monitor their expanding environment. With this software-based NETSCOUT approach to implementing smart data sources across this expanded environment, the company:

• Monitors network traffic flowing into and from primary data center by deploying InfinStreamNG software with NETSCOUT Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) to generate smart data to fuel realtime nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform performance analytics
• Gains needed network deployment flexibility by installing nGenius packet flow switch software appliance technology at their data, which also aggregates 10G network links to InfiniStreamNG software appliances
• Brings visibility to hundreds of local Contact Centers in a cost-contained manner by deploying virtual nGenius Collector software to collect, analyze, and store high-volume, NetFlow-based data generated in the Cisco SIP trunking environment
• Acquires new visibility required for new VMware and Cloud by installing vSTREAM virtual appliance technology on virtualized platforms

The IT and Network Teams now have dedicated nGeniusONE Service Dashboards to monitor their end-to-end environment, regardless of location or platform, with ASI converting network packets and NetFlow into one common data source consumed by nGeniusONE performance analytics for network, applications, and UC services.

The Results

The company is moving to a proactive monitoring approach that had long eluded IT resources by capitalizing on nGeniusONE real-time monitoring and NETSCOUT’s universal smart data source.

A lot was riding on this transition to NETSCOUT technology for the IT organization – after all, they had been using numerous other point technology solutions for performance management and service assurance. Except, those solutions only equipped IT with a reactive monitoring solution offering limited visibility that could not be used for successful troubleshooting or MTTR reductions.

While other vendors sought to provide solutions based primarily on deep discounts rather than the next-generation technology truly required, the company made the decision to select NETSCOUT based on several factors:

• NETSCOUT resources partnered with the company to provide a solution design that factored their expanded network, including hundreds of additional sites and new demands involving cloud, virtual, and UC platforms.
• The company’s Network Manager had already successfully used nGeniusONE at another insurance industry company and assured his colleagues that the NETSCOUT solution could bring the proactive monitoring they needed to monitor root cause and complete service troubleshooting.
• IT is realizing improved workflows and operations success by using nGeniusONE to proactively monitor their environment, use single-pane-of-glass views to spot anomalies as they are occur and then forward issues to appropriate IT resources for resolution.

Finally, the company’s ability to quickly capitalize on the financial benefits of business expansion can be more readily realized when IT resources can assure high-quality service delivery across the business, regardless of technology platform or company location.