UK Financial Services Organization Securely Manages Business Growth with NETSCOUT Packet Flow Switch Solution

Customer Profile

This UK financial services leader offers a diverse business model to support insurance, retail, and commercial banking customers. With more than 25 million customers around the world, the bank has successfully deployed online and mobile platforms for users, while implementing a strategic business plan to simplify lending services to UK homebuyers.

Business Challenge

The bank’s business growth generated the need for data center expansion, which brought associated network traffic increases and cybersecurity risks to the organization’s Information Technology teams. The network and cybersecurity teams in this IT organization have come to work very collaboratively to ensure visibility into wire traffic for all their monitoring needs.

In addition, the bank uses an external provider to assist with network operations management.

In supporting the bank’s IT organization’s efforts to manage network traffic and security challenges, the cybersecurity team has deployed various third-party solutions in the data center environment. In order to maximize the efficiency of these cybersecurity platforms, the bank required network packet broker technology capable of filtering and forwarding traffic to the appropriate cybersecurity and/or monitoring system for analysis.

NETSCOUT Solution

The IT team turned to NETSCOUT, an existing partner for Service Assurance and Packet Flow Switch (PFS) technology solutions, to improve network visibility for its cybersecurity team.

The bank selected NETSCOUT’s nGenius 2200 series packet flow switch technology and NETSCOUT TAPs, which enable IT to tap into network wire traffic and feed vital data to the third-party cybersecurity platforms.

In addition, the bank selected the nGenius 6000 series packet flow switch, which provides high-density port aggregation and packet forwarding for monitoring and security tools.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

In monitoring the bank’s branch and business communications network traffic entering the data center environment, the nGenius 2200 series packet flow switch optimizes the flow of packets from the network to the bank’s cybersecurity systems.

With the nGenius 2200 series packet flow switch providing key flow management functions, such as speed conversion, aggregation, and load balancing, NETSCOUT’s solution also protects the bank’s network in the event of power loss or tool failure. The nGenius 2200 series packet flow switch performs advanced functions in hardware – rather than on a CPU that limits throughput and introduces variable latency – enabling the bank’s monitoring systems to see the exact same traffic that comes in, all without packet drops or extra latency.

In selecting the nGenius 2200 series packet flow switch solution over competitive approaches, the bank identified NETSCOUT’s patented pfsMesh™ self-organizing mesh technology as a key differentiator that provides the cybersecurity team the ability to scale link-layer visibility and data access to a system-level architecture, thereby enabling participating devices and hundreds of ports to comprise part of a single logical system. The tool chaining delivers advanced packet flow switching for 10 GigE networks, while optimizing the effectiveness of cybersecurity tools.

In addition, the bank is implementing nGenius 6000 series packet flow switch appliances in a production-level deployment.

Business Value

The NETSCOUT PFS technology optimizes the flow of network traffic to the bank’s cybersecurity systems and monitoring tools. The PFS technology collects and organizes the bank’s wire traffic, creating a unified packet plane that logically separates the network layer from the tool layer.

The nGenius 2200 series packet flow switch provides ingress-to-egress filtering over the bank’s whole network monitoring fabric, which creates a pervasive defense architecture against a broad range of attacks.

NETSCOUT provides full traffic flow visibility for the bank’s cybersecurity systems to perform effectively by processing only the traffic that those platforms are designed to “see” without wasting resources filtering or load balancing packets before the security logic can be applied.

As a strategic monitoring partner, NETSCOUT’s solution simplifies operational complexity for the IT team, enhancing efficiency of bank’s monitoring, performance and cybersecurity tools.

From a business assurance standpoint, the NETSCOUT PFS technology lowers risk of breach and loss of customer data, and reduces potential for damage to bank’s reputation as a leading UK lender.