State Commission Sets Digital Transformation Foundation with NETSCOUT

Customer Profile

Many of today’s government agencies find themselves working in multiple business and technology delivery capacities, and this U.S. State Commission is no exception. With more than 500 employees, this Commission provides regulatory oversight for wide-ranging business interests in the state, including utilities, insurance, transportation, financial institutions, and retail franchising.

At the same time, the Commission also provides information technology (IT) and technical support services to numerous state government agencies. These IT services are crucial for delivering efficient performance of the business systems supporting residents and state government resources.

The agency’s Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security teams have for years performed proactive monitoring of the Commission’s network and applications environment using NETSCOUT solutions. In recent years, the IT team had implemented an enterprise-wide nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution and installed InfiniStreamNG appliances in their data center environment.

With their nimble IT staffing approach, the NOC and Security teams have long benefited from improved service triage capabilities with NETSCOUT. These teams also came to realize the value of NETSCOUT Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) and its ability to transform wire data into NETCOUT Smart Data.

The Challenge

The Commission’s executive team had established a key initiative to reduce costs and modernize the IT environment. As part of this project, IT wanted to update their network speeds from 1G to support both 10G and 40GB. In addressing the reduced operating expenses (OPEX) goal of the Commission, IT also wanted to transition certain applications to the cloud, with apps like Oracle, Sequel, and Web-based forms prioritized for migration.

The IT team had committed to a firm cutover date for opening a new data center. Public scrutiny, employee confidence, and agency integrity were all at risk if this data center transformation was anything less than a success! With the Commission’s prioritizing sustained public and internal confidence regarding agency integrity, IT knew this data center transformation would need to be completed, on time, without impacting daily government service delivery whatsoever.

For the veteran NOC and Security teams already performing service triage in the commission’s legacy IT environment, they knew end-to-end visibility from the new data center to their remote locations and a disaster recovery facility was the key to providing real-time monitoring of their new environment, including cloud platforms.

Solution in Action

With their data center implementation date fast approaching, the Commission decided to extend their existing nGeniusONE environment by deploying next-generation NETSCOUT service assurance technology. In enhancing the nGeniusONE Smart Analytics already in place, the IT team deployed additional ISNG appliance technology at the new data center, as well as the software-based COTS ISNG platform to provide the global visibility needed to better support the effectiveness of network and application performance management.

The IT team is addressing their need for increased speed and specific triage points in their network, including tapping 4 fiber 1GB and 50+ fiber 10GB links and feeding them into the nGenius 5000 series packet flow switch installed at the new data center. The nGenius packet flow switches aggregate traffic and send it to the ISNG platforms.

The IT team is removing virtual network and application visibility gaps by deploying the vSTREAM virtual appliance, which complements the ISNG platforms by monitoring ingress-egress traffic in the data center’s virtualized environment.

The IT team also benefitted from quick access to proactive monitoring and troubleshooting workflows tailor-made for their data center environment, with NETSCOUT Professional Services customizing nGeniusONE Service Dashboard and Service Monitors.

The Results

What convinced the Commission on moving forward with the NETSCOUT solution was seeing what the COTS ISNG, vSTREAM virtual appliance, and nGeniusONE technology could do to help them move their applications to the cloud. The IT team knew they had met their goals for successfully moving Oracle, Sequel, and Web form applications to the cloud, because nGeniusONE Service Dashboard and Service Monitors provided proof in the form of “before, during, and after” views. As a result, it’s business as usual with these apps, with high-quality performance and availability for the residents and businesses using the Commission’s Web forms on an everyday basis. With the Commission prioritizing high public perception of the services they deliver, this represented a significant win across the organization.

The Commission’s leadership also saw the proof of data center transformation success when they viewed daily nGeniusONE Executive Reports that showed overall health of the network, including bandwidth utilization and link usage. They also realized cost savings derived by reductions in data center downtime service hours, thanks to nGeniusONE.

The Commission is better supporting employees and state citizens through the enhanced 40G network speeds, with the NETSCOUT PFS architecture positioning IT to successfully implement future digital platforms and next-generation security tools that will benefit the company’s users and customers.

By again turning to NETSCOUT, the Commission also is realizing ROI from their legacy nGeniusONE and ISNG environment, with quicker time to value realized through experienced IT users already familiar with nGeniusONE workflows able to further reduce MTTR across their data center environment.