Leading Financial Assures Remote Office Access to Business Services With nGeniusPULSE

Customer Profile

This global financial services leader enjoys a significant market presence in the Americas, Europe, and APAC business regions.

The company’s information technology (IT) team has turned to NETSCOUT solutions to bring visibility into, and assure performance of, their next-generation data center infrastructure and network environment.

The Challenge

This company has operated hundreds of remote financial offices in their global service regions for many years. The function of this branch office network extends well beyond brick-and-mortar points of presence for the company – their wealth management business unit is largely based in these locations.

The business relevance of these remote offices has not diminished over time – many of their clients prefer that their one-on-one annual wealth advisory reviews occur in these secure locations, just as they always have.

With the remote offices ranging in size – from on-campus, multi-floor sites with hundreds of advisors, to locations with a handful of financial services experts – there was a mix of network, applications, and communications technology solutions deployed to support business service delivery, including:

• Wi-Fi networks
• Wide area networks (WANs) and local area networks (LANs)
• Microsoft Teams and Voice over IP (VoIP) services
• Numerous business applications, including Customer Resource Management (CRM), brokerage, investment research, and custom apps

For years, the company’s IT leadership wanted to increase visibility into the performance of network and technology services deployed in these remote offices, as well as assure the quality of remote user access to these business applications.

Given these challenges, IT leadership recommended reviewing vendor solutions for providing the remote office and WFH visibility the company required, while meeting long-established cost containment guidelines.

Solution in Action

The company is gaining critically needed visibility into the quality of user experience, as well as business service performance across this remote work environment by deploying the NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE solution, including the following:

• nGeniusPULSE Hardware & Virtual nPoint sensors are installed at remote offices and WFH environments to run active tests over wired or Wi-Fi connections.
• nGeniusPULSE Virtual Server appliances, operating at the company’s data centers connect IT operations with remote office and WFH environments, based on nPoint test results returned to nGeniusPULSE Server.
• An nGeniusPULSE Dashboard displays these results in views, drill-downs, and alerts that offer intuitive monitoring and troubleshooting workflows.

Using this solution, IT operations took advantage of a number of nGeniusPULSE synthetic testing options to expand insight into the following:

• Wi-Fi performance, including availability and fault isolation between wired connections, Wi-Fi connections, or applications.
• Network connectivity and performance of WAN and LAN services.
• VoIP and Microsoft Teams Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) availability and performance.
• Performance of the network from, and between all locations, including proactive warning of network issues and identification of a problematic domain before users complain.

The IT operations team regards the nGeniusPULSE solution as a “traffic light” system, providing at-a-glance views into network connectivity, technology performance, and user experience across their remote office and WFH environments.

When nGeniusPULSE identifies an emerging high-level issue occurring in one of their business offices, the IT team performs remote investigation into root cause from their regional data centers – even including the use of the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for more advanced troubleshooting into whether the anomaly is impacting a larger group of users, networks, or services.

The Results

In a remote office network with hundreds of locations, IT subject matter experts can’t be everywhere to assure user experience and service quality – but the nGeniusPULSE solution has virtually delivered those capabilities to them.

While many factors contributed to the company’s ability to successfully navigate pandemic-challenges – with the business even reporting double-digit profits across the most recent fiscal year – IT operations’ expanded visibility into user experience at remote offices offered clients and employees sustained business delivery benefits, regardless of location.