Leading U.S. Bank Assures User Experience and VPN Performance During Critical Times

Customer Profile

This U.S.-based bank provides financial, insurance, investment, mortgage, and loan services to more than 70 million worldwide customers. 

The bank’s employee base is technically savvy, leveraging a suite of business applications that in turn support the digital platforms increasingly preferred by clients for their financial transactions. 

The bank is a long-time nGeniusONE customer, with information technology (IT) teams across the business using NETSCOUT smart visibility and real-time analytics for proactive monitoring, troubleshooting, and service assurance across the business. 

The Challenge

A significant employee population takes advantage of the bank’s virtual private network (VPN) to securely complete financial transactions and everyday business from remote locations and home offices. During the peak of the bank’s “work from home” phase, there were thousands of employees relying on the VPN to securely complete their job responsibilities, coordinate internal communications, and access the critical applications and technology services needed for everyday business. 

For the bank’s information technology (IT) team, spikes in network bandwidth consumption that could be monitored using their nGeniusONE platform and InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances were easily identified, tracked, and trended. As shifts occurred in the numbers and groups of employees working from home at any given time, associated changes would be made with internet bandwidth and VPN usage to the bank’s major data centers. Understandably, the more people working in branches and central offices, the less bandwidth and VPN capacity were needed. 

The recent global impact of COVID-19 changed all that, with: 

• Employees around the world instructed to work from home to better protect themselves from the pandemic, with branches closing to safeguard both clients and local banking representatives 
• More users relying on the VPN to conduct daily business, and clients likewise using digital and mobile apps for their transactions coming into the same data centers 
• The company’s financial livelihood even more linked to its ability to successfully process on-line banking, bill-pay services, and other financial transactions that were now critically important for clients in financial need 
• With the COVID-19 challenge now front-and-center, it was time for IT to: 
• Revisit their Internet access and VPN technology design and overall performance and make any changes necessary for consistent, high-quality service delivery 
• Assess overall bank readiness for the surge in digital transactions

Solution in Action

The bank quickly responded to these escalated business demands by relying on their long-time business partnership with NETSCOUT to: 

• Leverage pre-existing nGeniusONE views of network links and data center locations to plan appropriate bandwidth upgrades 
• Evaluate earlier nGeniusONE analytics and reporting to identify those VPN architecture elements that needed similar network capacity enhancements 
• Access a supply chain process that provided ISNG appliances for installation within days of order, ready for deployment to support the business in light of the impact of COVID-19 

As a result, the bank is strategically deploying purpose-built ISNG appliances from the internet access links to the data center network core to support 100G speeds required for today’s business transaction volumes. 

The Results

No financial services organization wants to rush through network upgrade projects and capital expense allocations with wide-ranging implications to the business and its clients. However, this bank was able to confidently move ahead with this critical upgrade within days of seeing the dramatic impacts of this pandemic by relying on their long-term business partnership with NETSCOUT and experience with their smart visibility sources and real-time performance analytics across the business. 

With the safety of clients and employees in mind, the bank nimbly increased network bandwidth and VPN capacity to support increased digital transactions and remotely coordinated business services at a most critical time. 

These decisive actions have not gone unnoticed in the global business community, with media coverage favorably disposed toward the bank’s decisions to close branches to safeguard clients and employees.