Financial Leaders Put a Lot of Stock in NETSCOUT

For stock exchange leaders in the financial industry, milliseconds in slowdowns or downtime can mean millions of dollars lost—not to mention significant hits to employee productivity, user experience, customer satisfaction, and overall company reputation. Over the last 5 to 10 years, studies have shown that an hour of downtime can result in approximately $9 million lost. In an industry where transaction time is critical to business, outages and regulatory fines for performance issues can result in significant losses for financial institutions.

Can’t Trade Without an Upgrade

Digital transformations have increased automation and efficiencies as well as complexity with the introduction of new technologies for stock exchange IT environments. Because of this, preventive maintenance and routine upgrades are critical to keep businesses operating at maximum efficiency. However, even with advanced notice, scheduled downtime may not go as planned and can lead to significant performance delays or, in worst-case scenarios, lengthy outages. At that point, IT teams working to correct performance issues are also likely to be juggling flooded customer support lines and phone calls about helpdesk tickets.

When issues occur following scheduled maintenance, a myriad of blame may get passed around, including the following mentioned in this article discussing recent high-profile failures in stock exchange IT environments:

• Involvement of contractors or third parties
• Firewall connectivity issues
• Domain Name System (DNS) problems
• Shortage of skilled IT personnel
• Complex infrastructure and poorly defined business processes

Regardless of the reason, improving visibility by increasing instrumentation to address performance challenges head-on is critical to reducing the potential for disruption when leading stock exchange networks and services are due for updates, upgrades, and maintenance.

The Kicker for the Ticker

Stock exchange leaders must prioritize reliable network and application performance to meet expectations for business. Financial trading research data, such as that found in stock tickers, must be reported in real time to provide the most precise, uninterrupted information during market hours. Critical concerns for financial institutions also include the following:

• Continuous, uninterrupted access to financial data from anywhere, at any time
• Timely dissemination of information via multicast technology to accurately reflect market behavior to customers
• Ability to support periods of high-traffic bursts
• Compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) to honor commitments to clients
• Quality user experiences for trading and business-critical applications

NETSCOUT Solutions: A Smart Investment

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management provides financial institutions with the packet-level visibility needed to support their unique business challenges, such as assuring the performance of multicast market data feeds. With NETSCOUT, IT teams can conduct endpoint tests as well as proactive synthetic tests to measure user experience quality and get ahead of performance issues before users themselves realize a negative impact. Early warning capabilities, alerting, and reporting allow IT teams to quickly triage service issues and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) degradations, using packet data to identify why the slowdowns are occurring. Additionally, by continuously tracking and trending data in real time, organizations can build a repository of information to help them with capacity planning and strategic adjustments to the bandwidth that will help avoid potential bottlenecks and better support them in future initiatives.

By using one streamlined, vendor-agnostic solution, organizations can reduce the noise to identify the true root cause of performance issues and improve troubleshooting times. NETSCOUT’s solutions are powered by scalable deep-packet inspection, providing IT professionals with the precise information they need to navigate the digital complexities of the financial industry.

Learn more about how this stock exchange leader leveraged nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions to eliminate visibility gaps and reduce MTTR to improve user experience and assure optimal network and application performance.