Partner Use Case | Ensure the Performance, Reliability and Security of Critical Digital Services

This case study was written and contributed by our partner, NETSCOUT.

A leading financial services institution relies heavily on their applications and the infrastructure that supports them to provide industry-leading financial services to their customers. Customer and service partner frustration resulting from lengthy service disruptions, poor performance, and unreliable connectivity began reaching intolerable levels. The IT department of this organization determined that they had enormous visibility gaps across the digital infrastructure that supports these services. The organization quickly realized that they needed to expand their coverage by deploying additional Deep Observability tools beyond their own domain to include remote offices, the cloud environment that was offloading some of their processing, and third-party co-location facilities that provided essential application components.

Customer profile

This leading banking institution provides wealth management and investment services to affluent clients and corporations worldwide. To support their valued customers across the globe, this bank has an extensive infrastructure with remote offices, data processing colocations, private data centers, and a strong AWS cloud presence with additional plans for expansion on the horizon.

A longtime NETSCOUT® customer, this bank's investment in nGenius® Enterprise Performance Management has enabled them to increase observability and extend instrumentation to virtually any business edge. With hundreds of business-critical financial applications to monitor, this bank's IT team must ensure always-on network and application performance to meet the needs of high-wealth clients and their employees providing them with essential services.

The challenge

In such a competitive industry, this bank's executive team endorsed a comprehensive observability strategy to ensure the best performance and user experience of their digital services. This included support for their AWS cloud growth initiatives to support continuous innovation and deliver reliable financial services to their valued customers. The Bank's IT team, in collaboration with their NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service (VaaS) experts, addressed observability expansion in three key areas of their network:

1. Extend instrumentation to increase visibility at distributed remote locations: This global bank has an expansive infrastructure, making it difficult for IT teams to monitor network and application performance at locations where staff or IT resources were not physically present. This bank needed to extend NETSCOUT instrumentation across headquarters in the U.S. and EMEA, colocations in Equinix and CoreSite, their AWS cloud environment, and at remote sites like ATMS, storefronts, and branch offices worldwide to continuously gather packet-level information and assure performance across their environment.
2. Improve troubleshooting of business-critical application performance: The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) messaging network enables banks and financial institutions to send and receive transfers and confidential information quickly and accurately. Approximately five trillion dollars a day in transactions including cash, instruments, stock, and commodities are transferred over SWIFT. Additionally, the bank's teller application provides instant connectivity between users and their banks, enabling them to access account information, balance details, and perform transactions for virtually any location at any time.  Without observability and intuitive dashboards to assess performance insights from business-critical applications like SWIFT and teller, the bank was running into lengthy troubleshooting times and increased mean time to repair (MTTR) when degradations and slowdowns occurred, resulting in dissatisfied customers and potential damage to their brand and bottom line. Most critical was the risk to the prompt execution of financial transactions, which could lead to lost revenue, customer attrition, and even regulatory compliance issues.
3. Increase performance monitoring to support business growth initiatives: Business resiliency is essential for this bank, committed to executing on digital transformation plans, building out service integrations, and migrating to AWS cloud while simultaneously delivering uninterrupted network and application performance. The executive team has big plans for cloud innovation with customer-facing applications, making packet-level visibility vital for the IT team to monitor performance and big data across their complex global infrastructure as they continue to modernize.

Solution in action

By increasing observability and extending NETSCOUT instrumentation out to remote sites, colocations, AWS and beyond, the IT team at this bank had what was necessary to manage network and application performance and user experience quality with one holistic, vendor-agnostic solution. With nGenius Enterprise Performance Management, the bank was able to support their goals of:

• Reliable application performance: As a leader in the industry, this bank has high standards for uninterrupted network and application performance and high-quality user experiences. NETSCOUT's comprehensive observability enabled IT teams to ensure the availability of business-critical applications like SWIFT and teller, which are relied on for trillions of dollars' worth of transactions each day. Using the nGeniusONE solution, they built out intuitive executive dashboards streamlining critical packet-level performance insights from hundreds of applications to triage, prioritize, and troubleshoot effectively.
• Growth and innovation: With packet-level visibility supporting their cloud migration plans, the IT team successfully monitored the onramp to AWS cloud. As they continued to modernize operations and innovate, they applied deep packet inspection at scale to essential integrations like ServiceNow to support operational growth.
• Business resiliency: By deploying multiple InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) and vSTREAM appliances in their private data centers, colocations, and cloud environment, the IT team extended visibility to support their disaster recovery strategy. This end-through-end visibility met executive expectations for business resiliency to help the bank deliver uninterrupted services to their high-wealth clientele.

The results

This leading bank is committed to continuous innovation, growth and resiliency as they undergo digital transformations to support the needs of their high-wealth clients. Assuring the uninterrupted performance of their networks and business-critical applications is key to delivering on this commitment. Using a combination of packet-based insights from ISNG appliances worldwide and comprehensive dashboards in nGeniusONE, the IT team has streamlined their troubleshooting processes, dramatically reduced mean time to repair (MTTR), and increased observability across their data centers, colocations, cloud environment, and remote sites.

By assuring the performance of revenue-impacting applications and services, improving customer service to avoid churn, and helping to avoid headline-grabbing disruptions that damage company brand and reputation, NETSCOUT solutions have minimized business risk associated with performance delays for this organization. From headquarters to AWS to branch banks to ATM machines, the nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution powers this bank to deliver the financial services their customers rely on and expand operations to grow business at the same time.