Protecting Big Pharma Network and Application Reliability With NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

This biopharma is an industry leader, and the company has expanded in recent years through sales growth and business acquisition.

For years, the biopharma’s information technology (IT) team has relied on NETSCOUT service assurance and smart visibility solutions to help meet their business service delivery challenges.

The Challenge

Needing to quickly and cost-effectively establish data center services to host newly acquired pharma business service operations, the IT leadership team planned to sequentially establish Co-located data center (Co-lo) facilities across numerous, distributed locations.

In addition to establishing new Co-lo environments to support expanded biopharma operations, the IT team had to manage other associated challenges presented by the acquisition, including:

• Assuring service delivery quality to thousands of new employees, many of whom were using Virtual Private Network (VPN) services to access critical business applications, as well as an Amazon WorkSpaces’ Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution.
• Monitoring the performance of an increased number of custom biopharma applications operating across the business.
• Migrating from a Microsoft Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams Collaboration Services platform, while maintaining service quality offered by their Microsoft Office 365 environment.
• Consolidating the multi-vendor tools in use by the acquired company’s IT team to reduce expenses, while enhancing standardization and utilization across biopharma operations.

While the IT team recognized that increased Co-lo business traffic would require additional data source and real-time monitoring services to assure performance, they were cautious in adding yet another vendor to the mix, whose technology and service levels would require further disruption to daily management operations.

Solution in Action

Given a multi-year track record of supporting the biopharma’s IT team across numerous digital transformation project successes, company leadership again turned to NETSCOUT as the business partner best equipped to meet their acquisition-related challenges. In standardizing on NETSCOUT smart data sources and performance analytics for this Co-lo rollout, the company deployed the following solution elements:

• Extended their existing nGeniusONE platform licensing, which equipped additional IT users with real-time monitoring and proven performance analytics workflows to assure business service performance across newly established Co-lo’s.
• ISNG appliances instrumented at Co-lo’s to passively monitor traffic traversing across the network, improve visibility into network choke points, and generate smart data used to source nGeniusONE performance analytics into biopharma application, network, and business service performance.
• nGenius packet flow switch (PFS) appliances deployed at Co-lo’s to support 100GB network speeds, as well as the connections to and from hybrid cloud environments and data center facilities. This solution also offered a fully meshed PFS architecture that enhanced architectural redundancy and improved traffic origin visibility for both the IT and Security teams, which were critical considerations in this multi-site network.

Beyond technology, the NETSCOUT Onsite Service and Remote Service Engineers, contracted by this customer for years, continued to offer recommended-practices deployment guidance and nGeniusONE customization expertise that would prove critical to project success, including:

• Assisting with PFS configuration issues (e.g., asymmetric routing, use of VLAN tags, port channeling) to bring full visibility to the nGeniusONE platform and third- party security tools monitoring the Co-lo environments.
• Establishing specific nGeniusONE service dashboard and analytics views that allowed IT operators to visualize, monitor, and troubleshoot services supporting remote user access, including VPN and Amazon WorkSpaces. Other established nGeniusONE views enabled IT to monitor new biopharma applications and custom apps deployed as a result of the acquisition.
• Tailoring nGeniusONE unified communications dashboards and monitors to accommodate monitoring of the new Microsoft Teams environment, as well as sustained assurance of the Office 365 environment supporting an increasing number of biopharma employees.
• Transitioning new IT users from a legacy vendor platform to maximize the superior workflows of nGeniusONE for real-time monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting.

The Results

While there were many variables to be managed during these concurrent digital and data center transformations, there was never a doubt about IT’s decision to standardize on NETSCOUT solutions and services to assist the organization in meeting these challenges. NETSCOUT’s vendor independence helped the IT team ensure visibility, regardless of the application, cloud provider, or data center technology being implemented.

While this acquisition made headlines at the time of execution, the IT team’s ability to maintain “business as usual” operations across this expanded enterprise landscape made for a smooth transition for both employees and the customers who rely on continued excellence from this biopharma industry leader.

For company leadership, the end results were reflected in the biopharma’s ability to leverage acquired business resources to quickly introduce new drugs to the marketplace using a largely virtual release process.