Manufacturer Assures Both Availability and Quality End-User Experience

Customer Profile

This worldwide equipment manufacturer, based in the U.S., builds agricultural, construction, and forestry equipment in more than 100 facilities spread across 30 countries. More than 60,000 employees deliver product design, development, production, and sales services, helping the business achieve annual revenues topping tens of billions of dollars. This takes coordination, communications, and collaboration on a global scale. They have come to depend heavily on the efficient, continuous operation of their networked application resources throughout regionally distributed data centers. To ensure availability and quality operation of these applications for their employee community, they have partnered with NETSCOUT.

The Challenge

With the advent of COVID-19, government officials in the U.S. and around the world were sending non-essential employees home. This manufacturer was no exception. The IT organization had recently implemented a new Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting environment in their data centers and had increased bandwidth to 10GB in each, which would ensure employees had access to application services to do their jobs. The network and security teams recognized that any potential DDoS attack would pose a major threat to the availability of the virtual private network (VPN) gateways in their two data centers. Despite the increased bandwidth for the thousands of new work-from-home employees, even a small DDoS attack would negatively impact the performance, could possibly bring down a VPN gateway. This would effectively stop business for the remote/home users and the company. Given the speed of business changes due to COVID-19, this collaborative IT team knew they had to work fast to protect their VPN.

Solution in Action

This manufacturer had a commitment to ensuring quality end-user experience for their work-from-home employees and was already using the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for monitoring the VPN in their ISP hosting environment for performance issues. Further, they were familiar with Arbor for DDoS protection, having used it in the past.

Concluding that the Arbor Edge Defense (AED) platform was the best solution for their situation, they selected the AED 2800 for each of their two data centers, deployed between the firewall and the internet router. AED, a scalable, stateless, packet processing technology, is an always-on, in-line solution that provides DDoS attack detection and mitigation. It acts as a network perimeter threat intelligence enforcement point, blocking inbound and outbound DDoS attacks, malware, and C2 communications. This was precisely what they needed to protect availability for their thousands of worldwide employees now performing business activities from home.

The Results

This IT organization prides itself on quality delivery and availability of application services for their employees. When they were faced with an overnight change in how those employees work, the network and security teams knew they needed to add visibility to protect availability of corporate resources. In this case, not only was this IT team able to assure quality performance of their ISP hosting environment by leveraging nGeniusONE and ISNG appliances, they were also able to ensure access and availability with the addition of superior DDoS protection with the AED 2800 solution.

Because of their long-standing partnership, this manufacturer benefited from NETSCOUT’s global presence and ability to react swiftly to meet their pandemic crisis needs for quick delivery of the AED 2800s. Regardless of where their employees are doing their work – home or office – this manufacturer is confident they can maintain their normal high-quality end-user experience with service assurance and DDoS protection solutions from NETSCOUT.