Financial Leaders Invest in NETSCOUT Solutions

We have all heard the saying “time is money,” and network downtime has both financial leaders and their customers tightening their purse strings. The negative impact of performance issues, especially during market hours, can have significant immediate and long-term repercussions. In fact, it has been reported that critical business application outages can cost an average of approximately $500,000 per hour of downtime. Employees and customers rely on consistent trading, investment, and banking application performance from anywhere, at any time. Because of this, it is critical that financial institutions increase visibility throughout their infrastructure to monitor performance and gain packet-level insights in real time.

Uptime and uninterrupted performance are also essential for financial leaders to build and maintain trust with their customers. When network and application performance falters, reputation and dependability take a critical hit—and may even be irrecoverable in the client’s eyes. Public reports of slowdowns and outages litter the evening news, and perhaps worse, social media platforms. News traveling via social media can quickly reach such a broad audience that the negative impact on businesses may be unpredictable. Downtime can also lead to legal battles between financial institutions and their customers if the disruption is substantial enough.

And of course, there are regulatory fines and financial losses that an organization experiences as a result of network and application performance issues. Governing bodies may even restrict the organization from certain activities for an extended period of time as it reassesses and improves its recovery strategy.

Visibility Throughout the Infrastructure

To avoid performance disruptions, IT teams need end-through-end visibility to monitor networks and applications regardless of where they are hosted or where users are accessing them. Although organizations may typically first consider increasing visibility in data centers, remote sites, cloud environments, and colocations, there are additional blind spots throughout the infrastructure that should be addressed to reduce vulnerability as well. Here are four other areas where financial leaders can leverage instrumentation to increase visibility and reduce risk:

1. Third-party connectivity. The revenue and data streams of many financial organizations depend heavily on third parties, making it critical to continuously monitor performance in those environments.
2. WAN, MPLS, and SD-WAN connections. Monitoring wide-area-network (WAN), multiprotocol-label-switching (MPLS), and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) connections is essential to ensure optimal performance from anywhere, at any time.
3. Load balancers. To improve performance and reliability, financial companies can implement instrumentation to monitor either side of load balancers such as F5.
4. DMZ environments. In addition to monitoring primary and secondary data centers, it is crucial to monitor both internal and third-party demilitarized zone (DMZ) environments.

In addition, tool sprawl remains a substantial hurdle for financial leaders, and consolidation continues to be a top priority for leadership teams. By streamlining tools and vendors, organizations benefit from a holistic view into network and application performance. IT teams are able to troubleshoot faster and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by quickly identifying the true root cause of degradations and eliminating finger-pointing between departments and vendors. Fewer tools will also reduce vendor management costs in the long term.

NETSCOUT Assures Performance for Financial Leaders

With NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management, financial leaders can prevent visibility gaps and tool clutter with one unified, vendor-agnostic, packet-based performance monitoring solution. This comprehensive solution can help improve bandwidth and capacity planning, user experience quality monitoring, decision-making, and planning as well as recovery times from disruptions—and so much more. NETSCOUT’s deep packet inspection at scale allows financial organizations to assure the performance of the critical networks and applications that power their business operations and the accurate dissemination of market information they provide to their customers to help them make timely and well-informed financial decisions.

Learn more about how this financial leader leveraged NETSCOUT solutions to proactively monitor performance, reduce MTTR, and consolidate tools to strengthen its overall business.