Government Agency Protects Voice and Video Service Quality, Modernizes Data Center

Customer Profile

This U.S. Government agency operates a high-security environment to safeguard physical assets dispersed across hundreds of technically diverse facilities throughout the country.

In helping carry out this mission, the agency employs tens of thousands of regional employees, also operating several data centers to support the information technology (IT) demands associated with keeping all these facilities running to their high security standards.

The Challenge

For nearly 10 years, the IT team had used NETSCOUT® nGeniusONE Unified Communications (UC) performance analytics to monitor the agency’s voice and video applications, including Telemedicine and Telehealth apps. During this time, IT gained necessary visibility into traffic running on their network environment by deploying NETSCOUT’s nGenius InfiniStream® appliance technology in a primary data center. The InfiniStream monitors packet data, then converts it into metadata that fuels nGeniusONE’s in-depth UC analytics. The agency has solved issues faster in their voice and video environment with greater position, thanks to their use of nGeniusONE over the years.

With the IT oversight team calling for ongoing review of, and as-needed updates to the agency’s data center environments, network designs, and application deployments, several strategic determinations were made that would result in the following enhancements:

• Upgrading network bandwidth to support faster 10G and 40G network speeds, which IT anticipated would help the agency avoid the adverse performance they occasionally experienced with some of their critical applications
• Rolling out a next-generation Network Operations Center (NOC) to better support the upgraded network, as well as the applications, services, and UC solutions running across that network
• Improving Data Center redundancy and disaster recovery prevention by enhancing network visibility at a secondary Data Center that had historically functioned as a “warm” standby site

While IT focused on these initiatives, the agency’s Security Operations (SecOps) team was similarly engaged in strategic efforts designed to enhance organizational safeguards. Specifically, they were interested in enhancing their Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Vulnerability Scanning solutions by gaining access to high-value network packet traffic that would improve the efficiency of security forensics activities. The issue was there were no means of accessing those valuable network packets in their installed vendor technology footprint.

As the agency’s teams sought solutions to these collective challenges, they also faced the realities of in-place annual government budget cycles.

Solution in Action

In extending a collaborative business partnership with this important government customer, NETSCOUT’s approach distinctly addressed the agency’s collective requirements for upgraded UC and network monitoring, network visibility, and forensic security by delivering a solution that blended next-generation smart visibility and packet broker technology to expand the return on investment already offered by deployed nGeniusONE and InfiniStream solutions. This next generation solution delivers:

• Expanded network visibility, with next-generation InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) technology deployed in the new NOC to support the agency’s faster 10G and 40G network speeds and the legacy InfiniStream redeployed in the secondary data center to offer additional network visibility and network monitoring redundancy
• Enhanced monitoring of agency user experience, with already-deployed nGeniusONE analytics further benefiting from ISNG’s ability to transform packet data into smart data in real time, thereby improving the value of NETSCOUT’s UC monitoring capabilities
• Improved security visibility, with nGenius packet flow switch (PFS) technology feeding traffic to the agency’s IDS and Vulnerability Scanning platforms. As a result, SecOps can now tap the agency’s faster 10G and 40G links and distribute traffic, with appropriate filtering as necessary, to the downstream security tools

The Results

The agency’s ability to realize extended return on investment from their existing NETSCOUT deployment was a key factor in moving forward with next-generation ISNG and PFS technology solutions.

As a result, the agency now maximizes the benefits offered by their upgraded NOC and Data Center environments, with NETSCOUT helping them achieve real-time voice monitoring and video performance management.

By extension, the NETSCOUT solution enables the agency’s network, applications, and other services involved in high-quality delivery of voice and video performance to support uninterrupted performance.