Financial Company Improves User Experience While Planning Digital Transformation

Customer Profile

This large financial company specializes in consumer lending with over 5000 employees in multiple operation and sales centers supporting customers across the US. Immediate, secure, and consistent customer service to prospective and existing clients and 3rd parties via phone and online interactions is the cornerstone of their business. 

The customer-facing nature of the business, combined with the importance of assuring timely financial transactions, makes it essential that all systems are up and running constantly and consistently. At the same time, they need to implement digital transformation initiatives to meet customers’ ever-increasing expectations as well as addressing pressing business demands for agility, flexibility, and cost-efficiencies. 

The Challenge

As part of their recent digital transformations, the company had invested in data center upgrades to 100GB in their infrastructure. Simultaneously, they were investing in virtualization and cloud. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit the financial organization and all of their employees moved to a work-from-home model. End users were continuously experiencing availability and performance issues with critical business and communications applications like Citrix and VoIP services. Despite collaborative efforts between the application and network teams, their legacy point tools lacked comprehensive monitoring and analysis to identify the true source of many of the issues. These issues, and the extended time to resolve, presented an immediate and serious potential for devastating impact to the business. 

The IT team defined the requirements necessary to solve both current issues and those that may emerge in the future: 

• Application level visibility to reduce the time to troubleshoot complex, elusive, end-user impacting issues. 
• Network visibility to monitor applications across the data center, the MPLS links, as well as, the newer 100GB segments, to pinpoint source of issues. 
• A single solution to monitor their voice, video and business data applications, like Oracle and Citrix, their Cisco Voice environment, and future applications deployed in the cloud and virtualized infrastructure. 

Solution in Action

With the foundational requirements as a guide, the team conducted a thorough analysis of a variety of different alternatives. Most were found to address only parts of their needs. They selected the NETSCOUT^® Service Assurance solution to meet all of their current and future needs. 

• nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with InfiniStreamNG appliances that recognize more than 1000 voice, video, and business data applications, including mission critical applications such as Oracle and Citrix, as well as Cisco UCS VoIP. This financial organization gains troubleshooting capabilities to attack responsiveness and quality issues at high traffic consolidation points across their data center and MPLS links to help pinpoint problems quickly and reduce time lost in typical finger pointing between data center staff and MPLS vendor.
• nGeniusONE offers visibility without borders, providing insight into their application services regardless of the underlying infrastructure; data center, SDN, public cloud, co-locations, and/or SaaS, providing a ‘future-proof’ alternative that will grow with their ever-expanding digital transformations. 
• nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) to ensure monitored network packets are distributed from any network segment, including the new 100GB links, to InfiniStreamNGs, as well as other tools as appropriate. Packets may be conditioned, and filtered as each IT team requires. 
• nGeniusPULSE and nPoints, configured to run scheduled, consistent testing of services, including VoIP, even when users are not active, helps identify quality issues impacting user experience. Initially, these will be deployed at remote and branch locations to provide a view to performance from the end-user perspective. 

The Results

Like many companies, this financial organization was faced with having to solve problems that were impacting the business, challenged to support a suddenly remote workforce, while simultaneously planning and innovating for the future. The analogy of “changing the tires while the bus is running” was painfully apt for their situation. NETSCOUT solutions enable them to protect and improve their end-user experience and also set the stage for future upgrades and innovations that will keep them growing and competitive. 

• Lower Mean-Time-to Resolve (MTTR): Pinpointing source of issues with evidence that can be shared within the IT team as well as with third party WAN and infrastructure providers. 
• Improved collaboration: Internally between network operations, application, and voice teams; externally with Cisco UCS and their MPLS vendor. 
• Lower overall cost of ownership: One vendor for real-time, packet-based visibility & monitoring of voice, video, and business data applications, along with packet broker technology, and user experience analysis. 
• Future Proofed solution: With a concerted strategy and proven execution, the NETSCOUT solutions will deliver visibility into virtualized and cloud environments when they are implemented.