Case Study

SaaS Gains Essential Visibility for Service Assurance and Security of Customer Facing Network

SaaS Gains Essential Visibility for Service Assurance and Security of Customer Facing Network

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Data center transformation required additional visibility for service assurance and security
  • Needed to meet business goal of high-quality customer experience
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform with InfiniStreamNG appliances
  • nGenius® 5000 series PFS
  • Arbor Edge Defense with Arbor Cloud Connect
The Results
  • Protect availability of their customer’s business services as well as their user experience
  • Proactive visibility to reduce risk from performance and DDoS threats

Customer Profile

This company is a leading global provider of cloud-based software that powers the insurance business. Focused on insurance agencies and brokerages, they are a leader in innovation and have been an insurance technology pioneer as they empower some of the world’s largest, best-known insurers through creative, cloud-based software. At more than 1,500 employees, they are a formidable provider of agency & brokerage management systems serving customers in North America and Europe.

As they help automate the insurance lifecycle, they are enabling millions of people globally to safeguard and protect what matters most to them. They further assist their business clients with the ability to capitalize on new opportunities, increase the efficiency and profitability of their business, and continuously deliver high-level customer services. With more than $350 million in annual revenues tied to delivering software as a service (SaaS) solutions, it is no surprise the importance they place on their digital applications and network services.

The Challenge

The software company had been a customer of NETSCOUT’s for more than five years and had come to depend on the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for performance monitoring and analysis of key business services in their private data centers. Availability and performance of their software services are cornerstones of their success. With NETSCOUT, they were able to identify issues early and reduce the time it took to pinpoint the cause, enabling rapid resolution of issues, oftentimes before customers were impacted. 

Like many modern enterprises today, this software company’s Director of Network and Cloud services had two primary concerns when it came to constant availability and performance of their applications for customers, employees and partners: Service Assurance and Security! The IT staff was motivated to avoid or quickly address anything that might impede users from accessing on-line services, regardless of whether it was related to a performance problem or a denial of service (DDoS) issue. 

Given several recent data center and infrastructure changes, combined with plans for moving some of their services to VMware and to the cloud, the IT team initiated steps to ensure that they had visibility throughout their environment to protect against both service assurance and security disruptions.

Solution in Action

After years of collaboration, the IT team had developed a strong strategic relationship with the local NETSCOUT team and after debriefs on organizational goals, they crafted a plan to address the direction the company was taking in delivering services to customers and employees over a re-designed infrastructure model. With multiple data centers in North America and Europe, many critical applications, including several facing the customers, as well as internal applications used to support the accounts and service delivery, they created a two-pronged approach to deliver visibility for service assurance and security,

  • First, they expanded the existing nGeniusONE deployment with additional InfiniStreamNG appliances across their global data centers, combined with software-based nGenius 5000 series packet flow switches to ensure visibility and analysis was available where they needed it in their primary data centers.
  • Second, to protect their customer-facing SaaS offering, they developed a new security strategy to address threats from DDoS attacks, leveraging NETSCOUT’s innovative Arbor Cloud Connect with on-premise Arbor Edge Defense solutions.

The Results

The customer-focused software company has a strong track record of ensuring their SaaS offerings deliver the highest-quality end-user experience possible – after all, it is critical to their customer’s bottom line. And what is good for their customers will be good for the company as well. With this latest deployment of InfiniStreamNG appliances, nGenius Packet Flow Switches, and Arbor Edge Defense with Arbor Cloud Connect, they have taken yet another step toward gaining critical visibility to provide both Service Assurance and Security for their customers! Suffice it to say, revenue protection is a very real benefit from using NETSCOUT solutions to help prevent disruptions (regardless of performance or DDoS in nature) and rectify those that do occur quickly. 

The company is also benefiting from using the solution for monitoring and analyzing both their own internal corporate applications as well as for the customer-facing part of the network. IT learns one solution and uses it for all their service assurance needs which has reduced mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) problems that do emerge. Team collaboration with single-pane-of-glass views and reports from across the business, applications, and network perspectives are seamless, informative, and complete.