Improving Internet Performance for Financial Services Customers

Customer Profile

This company processes millions of business transactions every day, which has helped make the company a global financial services leader. 

The company sustained operations throughout the COVID-19 era, in part due to a number of successful information technology (IT) projects across that period that helped the business adapt to dramatic increases in online transactions and assure employee productivity throughout their own hybrid workforce transition. 

One common thread tying these diverse project wins was relying on IT’s long-term investments in NETSCOUT service assurance, smart visibility, and nGenius Packet Flow Switch (PFS) technology to improve service edge visibility and real-time monitoring across their business. Additional value was derived from highly collaborative engagements with their long-contracted NETSCOUT Premium Services Engineer (PSE). The IT team views their PSE as a trusted subject matter expert and de facto extension of their larger IT team and project operations efforts. 

The Challenge

Increased financial processing volumes, combined with the company’s own business growth, was taxing the front door of their Internet presence and by extension limiting their ability to provide value-added services to global customers. This was not a new issue to the IT team — an earlier project designed to consolidate their legacy Internet architecture had stalled. Given the changing demands caused by these financial processing and business growth areas, a much larger Internet architecture enhancement project would be required. Based on the IT team’s planning, this current-day project required: 

• Re-working and relocating their primary Internet circuits. 
• An increased reliance on Equinix Co‑located (Co-lo) Data Center services. 
• New, 100GB high-speed backbone between their main data centers. 

As a result, this project now was assigned top priority by IT Executives, and a new, established deadline to complete the move of the main Internet links. 

Solution in Action

The IT team invited their contracted NETSCOUT PSE to participate in early planning meetings, which led to increased collaborations between NETSCOUT subject matter experts and contacts across the company’s Architecture & Design team and Data Center operations. These collective resources validated a design that IT could successfully deploy by the project deadline, with this solution: 

• Providing highly strategic visibility into critical Internet infrastructure segments necessary for reliable performance, with service assurance facilitated by nGeniusONE real-time monitoring and use of well-established workflows. 
• Upgrading the network environment to 100GB speeds for the Internet links at the network edge and deploying software-based NETSCOUT Certified InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) 9800 series appliances for Smart Edge Monitoring. 
• Repurposing production-level ISNG appliances to additional locations to expand visibility across other 10GB network segments. 
• Use of nGenius Packet Flow Switches to distribute network packet traffic on 100GB segments to downstream devices, including ISNG appliances. 

In providing the IT leadership team with a detailed design that defined a granular network visualization factoring individual network tap and interfaces, NETSCOUT presented the company with a viable blueprint for maintaining Internet performance through the expanded deployment of software-based ISNG appliances and PFS brokers. NETSCOUT’s detailed network design and cost-contained approach enabled IT leadership to convince company executives that this was a viable Internet upgrade plan that could be successfully delivered. 

The Results

Based on the financial and customer service implications, this was one upgrade project the IT organization needed to complete. 

Adding the ISNG appliances at the high-speed Internet access points provided the company with the advantages that only NETSCOUT’s Smart Edge Monitoring delivers for ensuring not only visibility at key network edges but also in-depth, real-time analysis and workflows to tackle potential disruptions at the company’s “front-door.” 

NETSCOUT’s ability to use service assurance and service edge visibility to address wide-ranging network, cybersecurity, and application performance initiatives has enabled the IT leadership to confidently approach new technology initiatives based on earlier project successes.