Partner Use Case | Global Business Process Outsourcer Improves Service Delivery

This case study was created and contributed by our partner, NetScout.

Customer Profile

This company is one of the global leaders in the business process outsourcing (BPO) and consulting services industry. The company continues to diversify their business service solutions to stay apace of customer and prospect demands for solutions that assist with cloud and virtual technology adoption, data migration, and business analytics. 

The company is a long-time NETSCOUT customer, using the Arbor Edge Defense and Arbor Cloud cybersecurity solution for automated distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and perimeter defense. 

The Challenge

With the company operating at this global scale, their information technology (IT) departments rely on many vendor tools to help keep business services running in support of both customers and their own employees – wherever these consulting and managed service projects are deployed. 

The use of these tools notwithstanding, some network and application performance issues had emerged in one service delivery region, which prompted local IT leadership's involvement. One approach they considered involved deploying both infrastructure and application monitoring tools to offer enhanced monitoring of the application environment. 

Meanwhile, other visibility gaps had surfaced across the business, making it difficult for IT resources to monitor the following: 

• Company business traffic traveling over global wide area network (WAN), internet links, and virtual private networks (VPNs), which had significant usage from remote employees.
• Application performance at some on‑premises and co-located (Co-lo) data centers, with impacted services including Microsoft Office 365, Cisco Webex Teams, and business transaction apps.
• Applications are being migrated from one data center to another.

While they knew there were better alternatives than the tools in use and others they had been evaluating, IT leadership wanted to take a deliberate approach in product selection. As a result, any potential vendor would need to "show and prove" how their solution could address visibility and performance issues using real-world use cases and workflows rather than mere functionality demonstrations. 

Solution in Action

After realizing NETSCOUT offered the smart visibility and monitoring technology solution they needed, as well as a consultative operations approach that would engage stakeholders throughout deployment and production-level activities, company leadership made the commitment to extend their business relationship with NETSCOUT. As a result, they deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances and nGenius Packet Flow Switch (PFS) technology at global data center locations to close their visibility gaps. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform performance analytics used smart data generated by ISNG and PFS data sources to provide IT teams with improved application monitoring and service delivery across the business.

The NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service (VaaS) program delivered both staff augmentation services and recommended practices guidance for customizing nGeniusONE service dashboard and monitor views. NETSCOUT VaaS subject matter experts focused on key services, including Office 365 and Webex, that were critical the company's Network, Microsoft, Cisco, and Business Application teams. These NETSCOUT VaaS resources were able to show how best to derive smart data in real time from network traffic being monitored in the instrumented data center locations. 

With assistance from NETSCOUT VaaS, IT leadership was able to recognize early returns on investment that validated the company's commitment to NETSCOUT's solution approach, including: 

• Improving collaboration between Network and various Application Team stakeholders, with NETSCOUT VaaS-provided training showing how NETSCOUT smart data could be used to evaluate analytics related to Cisco, Microsoft, and other technology operations.
• Providing real-time monitoring of the company's extended-use virtual private network (VPN) to assure reliable remote employee access to critical applications necessary to delivering customer-facing services.
• Identifying root cause of a performance issue relating to an application that had been migrated from one data center to another. The NETSCOUT VaaS-led troubleshooting showed the problem related to a network issue, with traffic being routed incorrectly and causing latency. As a result, IT made configuration changes and returned the business application to high-level performance.

In addition, NETSCOUT VaaS resources collaborated with IT stakeholders to identify wide-ranging applications that required real-time monitoring, then customized nGeniusONE service dashboard and monitor views that IT could use for anytime, anywhere visibility into business service performance. 

The Results

In the global BPO and consulting marketplace, reputation and experience are critical for sustaining a company's commercial success. With NETSCOUT, this company's IT teams are equipped with a proactive monitoring solution that keeps business services up and running, so that the customer-facing solutions the organization is responsible for are delivered optimally. When issues do occur, IT has reduced mean-time-to-repair cycles and minimized downtime to improve service delivery across the company's customer base. These results can go a long way in enabling the company's business goals and maintaining industry-leadership standing in the minds of economic buyers. 

With the addition of the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and consultative NETSCOUT VaaS approach, IT leadership was equipped with a vendor-neutral solution that could be used to rationalize existing toolsets. With this solution, the company's subject matter experts can identify functionality gaps, vendor tool redundancies, and how production-level solutions could be expanded for greater return on investment.