National Joint-Stock Commercial Bank Improved Business Service Availability with nGeniusONE

Customer Profile

This joint-stock commercial bank supports a nationwide network of over a thousand branches and outlets in over a hundred cities across the country it operates in. With more than 25 million customers and revenue exceeding $50 billion, a focus on continuous improvement and innovation has clearly been a recipe for success. As a business that depends on the successful and accurate processing of millions of financial transactions daily, service assurance is of great importance to this organization.

The Challenge

This bank’s biggest challenge was a lack of visibility into critical business applications and services, at the network and application level. The NetOps team was responsible for monitoring hundreds of virtual links, but had no alarming set up to let them know if one of those links had an issue. Perhaps more urgent, they had hundreds of business applications they were responsible for, but no proactive application performance monitoring or alerting.

The risk to the business was considerable. Many of these business applications were critical for revenue generation or customer retention, some used to interconnect with third party payment processors or other execution of financial transactions. User experience suffered when these applications experienced degraded performance and IT was left unaware until end users complained.

Security was also a concern to the bank, as they strived to find ways to identify unauthorized attempts to access the network.

NetOps was determined to find a way to become more proactive, identifying factors that impaired business performance and security, so that they could find the root cause before users came to them.

Solution in Action

To address these challenges, this organization turned to NETSCOUT. The NetOps team deployed COTS-based InfiniStreamNG software on NETSCOUT certified appliances to provide cost-effective end-to-end visibility into their production environment. vSCOUT virtual appliances were deployed at “honeypots” to attract and collect unauthorized traffic attempting the access business services and forward the traffic on for deeper analysis.

The smart data generated by these data sources is converted into smarter analytics by the nGenius Service Assurance platform. Extracted from rich wire data, these analytics are displayed in dozens of custom service dashboards, showing at-a-glance-views into hundreds of critical business applications and services. Alerts are configured to proactively notify the NetOps teams when a service is starting to degrade. This allows them to jump into action and proactively resolve the issue before it becomes customer affecting.

In one case, nGeniusONE was used to identify an LDAP server that was running slow and causing timeouts. This server was responsible for supporting user authentication to a business login portal. Any delays in the service could interfere with user’s ability to log in and access important business services. With the new alerts in place, NetOps was able to see the problem and remediate before it became user affecting.

With the vSCOUT software in place, NetOps now has better visibility into potential security threats attacking their network. They can now see these attempted incursions and respond appropriately, giving them increased security and peace of mind.

The Results

With the nGenius® solution in place, the IT staff has now become proactive and service uptime and availability has dramatically improved. Issues are identified and resolved more quickly, improving end-user experience and speeding root cause analysis and identification.

vSCOUT virtual appliances have been instrumental in expanding visibility and collecting data on unauthorized traffic on the network, helping NetOps prevent breaches and keep the network more secure.

Flexible service dashboards and dependency maps allow the NetOps team to see the service flow of the different applications they manage, better enabling them to understand the interaction of the different applications that make up each service. This in turn helps them better understand the scope and impact of issues as they occur. Session analysis provides transaction level visibility into important business applications, such as credit card payments or electronic funds transfers. When a problem occurs, it’s now easy for NetOps to quickly locate the exact transaction and see what happened.

Customized network and service alerts have accelerated the timeliness and accuracy of notifications, allowing IT to proactively investigate and respond to service degradations or potential security breaches before they become catastrophic. Application baselining allows IT to understand the normal day to day service performance, only generating alerts if unexpected behavior is seen.