The healthcare provider was undergoing major data center transformations, including upgrades to 40GB core links and VMware virtualized servers. During a recent cut-over back to the primary data center, the organization experienced several performance issues with critical application services, including their EHR application, Epic. Hospital staff had lengthy wait times pulling up patient records they needed, log-ins were delayed, and record uploads were slow. All of this impacted the swift, safe, accurate treatment of the patients, and it even required the IT team to return service access to the back-up data center until they could pinpoint the source of the issues in the primary data center.

PETRONAS Dagangan Berhad, a subsidiary of Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS), is a leading oil and gas multinational in Malaysia. The company operates over 1,000 petrol stations and 725 convenience stores, offering a range of services from fuel to dining and banking. To maintain its market leadership, PETRONAS recognized the need for a proactive solution to detect and troubleshoot issues with its point-of-sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and logistics applications before they impacted customers. Prior to implementing a proactive monitoring solution, PETRONAS was unable to detect and correct IT service degradations, which could negatively impact customer experience. With over 1,000 remote locations and multiple applications interfacing with central data centers over the telco network, pinpointing disruptions became a significant challenge. PETRONAS needed a solution that could provide visibility across the entire environment to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) when problems were detected.

The organization had gone through a period of substantial growth due to additional customers and increased exchange volume, combined with several mergers and acquisitions. As a result, in order to continue to deliver technology and services at the high level they were known for, the IT organization was in the process of a strategic data center transformation. Central to this transformation was a new data center based on Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), along with targeted migration to public cloud, initially to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Visibility and security of the new data center, the several other data centers around the world for regional access throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as their customer facing network were of paramount importance. As a result of aggressive expansion and acquisitions, the IT team had inherited a very diverse range of technologies and vendors, sometimes providing similar services, although delivering inconsistent experiences for the end users. The problem only snowballed as the organization relied on more parties for pieces of their infrastructure. The boundaries of responsibility between the growing number of infrastructure technology and vendors were becoming blurred, and the time to troubleshoot issues was increasing.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, use of university applications and networking services shifted a number of times in several ways, ranging from users being fully on campus, to some on campus and some off-site, to most accessing resources remotely. This created a variety of challenges for meeting the high-quality standards for responsiveness, availability, and reliability in performance of their services. Users required quality digital experience with their LMS application to turn in assignments and report grades; Microsoft Office 365 for email, collaboration, and content applications; and for voice and collaboration services, like MS Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and others. The IT team identified a gap in application-level visibility into these services that made it difficult to assure quality of experience and troubleshoot issues when they occurred. Additionally, they wanted to be able to work cooperatively, in an informed manner, with some of their third-party technology vendors delivering WAN and Internet access, cloud services, software as a service (SaaS) applications, voice, and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) applications.

The company’s portfolio includes mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and brokerage services. As a result, customers and employees rely on critical financial and web-based applications and business services for important functions, such as making investment decisions and monitoring performance of stock trading and market data feeds to help them manage trillions of dollars in investments. The company began experiencing limitations with the performance they were receiving from the legacy information technology (IT) operating in their data center. A particularly troublesome issue was application owners were struggling to maintain visibility into the performance of financial business services. The IT application owners knew the importance of finding and resolving any latencies as quickly as possible. Slow market data feeds have a potentially massive fiscal impact in the financial services marketplace.

One of the largest financial institutions in Eastern Europe was undergoing a rebranding effort and restarting relationships with millions of clients worldwide. During this project, they experienced a massive DDoS attack that crippled over 90% of their customer-facing IT capabilities. This attack depleted network resources and limited the high availability of business-critical, customer-facing services for several days. The organization put out an RFI to educate themselves about the variety of DDoS protection products, strategies, and solutions that were being practiced within their industry. Of the multiple applications, only three vendors were asked to enter the proof-of-concept testing phase.

SK Telecom, a leading wireless communications operator in Korea, has been facing challenges due to the rise in mobile data and signaling traffic, driven by the increasing usage of 3G and 4G devices such as smartphones and tablets. The company has also been dealing with the threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and mobile application anomalies. Over the last three years, the number of attacks against their mobile network has increased five-fold. These attacks put additional traffic on an already stressed mobile network infrastructure, making it vital for these attacks to be detected and stopped as soon as possible. Additionally, poorly written mobile applications can cause major problems when popular mobile apps used by millions of subscribers encounter problems, acting like a DDoS attack on the mobile network.

Dell, a multinational information technology company, was facing challenges in monitoring its global network. The company was using network analysis appliances and freeware software utilities, which only provided rudimentary network information. The lack of detailed information made troubleshooting complex and time-consuming. For instance, if users reported slow application performance, the IT team had to determine whether the problem was a software issue, a hardware issue, or a network issue before they could even begin to troubleshoot. This could take up to a week, causing project delays or product shipment delays. Additionally, the IT group needed a better way to conduct network capacity planning. Without knowing who was using the network and how they were using it, both over-preparing and under-preparing could be costly to the business.

The healthcare provider was engaged in a major multi-year, multi-million dollar unified communications (UC) project. The IT team recognized that if the upgraded UC clusters were not fully tested under load, the system could be vulnerable to a range of failures, such as call drops and lack of dial-tone. Without real-time visibility and analysis in the production network, patient-impacting problems could persist far longer than would be acceptable. IT needed to verify and stress test the system in pre-production before go-live, to attain service assurance. A further goal was to put a solution in place that would allow IT to protect the performance of the new VoIP services post-deployment in the actual production environment. This solution would have to enable IT to proactively get ahead of issues before they impacted patients. At the same time, IT wanted to reduce number of vendors they manage, thereby reducing time lost to vendor finger pointing in its complex UC&C environments.

The Canadian public healthcare agency was facing a challenge of ensuring 'always on' access to networks and applications for health organizations and providers. The IT team was under tremendous pressure to ensure its new electronic health record system and data centers offered flawless network connectivity with hundreds of patient care providers. The challenge IT faced was a lack of comprehensive visibility across its geographically dispersed, mission-critical data centers and both physical and virtual infrastructures. Network Operations had very limited tools for monitoring network and application performance. IT triage and troubleshooting would take hours, if not days to complete. This meant IT was spending upwards of 50 percent of its time on service issues, and in some cases the problems went unresolved far longer than acceptable. Due to the vast amounts of healthcare data and the complex, multitiered applications that were in use, it proved extremely arduous to pinpoint the root cause of application slowness – potentially impacting patient care.

The healthcare organization was facing a delay in transitioning to a Cisco ACI environment due to a lack of visibility to completely identify all the applications and their dependencies that needed to be moved. The problem was further compounded by the complexity and inefficiencies created by multiple existing tools that were incomplete and disconnected, making it difficult for the teams to have common measurements, processes and reporting. The teams decided they needed to re-examine their network monitoring system and upgrade to the latest technologies to handle their requirements now and be positioned for future enhancements. They planned to implement high-quality network and application monitoring from their remote hospitals that have small VMware clusters, and deploy a new VoIP system. This brought up another challenge; ensuring that any solution they were going to implement met the needs of all the IT teams, i.e. Citrix, Voice, database, server, help-desk etc.

The large-scale government agency was battling persistent cyberattacks and had gaps in visibility. The Security Operations (SecOps) response was slowed by log-intensive cyberattack response processes. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) was tasked with enhancing the agency’s cybersecurity profile to address their expanding threat landscape without adding to vendor tool sprawl.

The financial services sector is undergoing a significant digital transformation, driven by advanced computing and analytics, omni-channel service delivery, government mandates, and blockchaining. The industry is grappling with how to best utilize the Internet of Things (IoT), which could potentially impact ATM and mobile banking. The financial industry is also facing the challenge of meeting the fast-paced customer expectations set by digital service processes like Netflix and iTunes. Customers now expect all services to be delivered quickly and flawlessly, and financial institutions must integrate web, mobile, phone, and in-person services like never before. Additionally, the industry is facing challenges related to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). By 2017, it is predicted that the typical IT organization will spend up to 30% of its budget on GRC and security.

Agilent Technologies is transitioning to a digital business model that heavily relies on cloud technology. The company plans to digitize life sciences through various initiatives, including building Internet of Things (IoT) connected lab tools and offering SaaS-based laboratory management software. This shift to the cloud has led to a significant increase in network traffic across the company's 120 locations. To manage this, Agilent implemented a software-defined wide area network to increase bandwidth and availability for critical services. However, the company needed to assure service quality and performance across its global network and retain corporate control over public and private clouds.

The bank was engaged in a high-profile, multi-faceted, and costly unified communication (UC) upgrade project across their call centers and data centers, moving to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking from a traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) model. This initiative was projected to save the company $1 million per month. However, this multi-vendor voice environment required 24-hour uptime, which was being compromised by quality of service (QoS) issues. Queues began filling up as calls flooded into the call centers, resulting in long delays, which in turn negatively impacted the customer service experience. IT was faced with the significant challenge of finding the source of the problem among different session border controller (SBC), media Intranet and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology vendors. Lacking vendor-independent visibility into this complex environment resulted in massive finger pointing and long delays in resolving issues.

The financial services organization faced a significant challenge when merchants began reporting intermittent issues with cards being declined at point-of-sale (POS) terminals. This was causing a poor end-user experience, lost revenue, and customer satisfaction issues. The IT staff had no visibility into the company’s network, making it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of the transaction failures. The declined transactions could have been an indication of an actual transaction failure or just an authorization failure. Without deeper insights, resolving the problem proved a significant challenge.

The company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) is promoting digital transformation initiatives to improve performance of the technologies used to efficiently deliver financial transactions for customers. These projects include undertaking lift-and-shift application workload migrations to software-defined networking (SDN) and hybrid cloud platforms. One IT team is overseeing implementation of several next-wave digital transformation projects, including updating the trading platform used by brokers in their client service centers to an intelligent, voice-based turret solution that includes Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking and IT connectivity technology. While the company was widely using NETSCOUT for monitoring and Help Desk ticket troubleshooting across the business, the IT team responsible for the new trading platform did not use nGeniusONE. They instead relied on another vendor’s analytics and data sources, which had IT-perceived limitations regarding Unified Communications & Collaborations (UC&C) analytics and platform security.

The agency's IT visibility requirements had evolved due to emerging remote service delivery challenges. The currently installed solution was not delivering network visibility as promised, nor visualizing user experience across agency operations. The agency needed a solution that could provide continuous monitoring of end-user experience, real-time awareness of impairments detrimental to strategic, worldwide communications, intuitive and compressed IT workflows for rapid triage, and support for historical analysis and investigations based on full-packet captures. The agency also preferred a packet-based, vendor-agnostic solution that could be integrated with other installed technologies, while also improving the use and value offered by those tools.

The organization did not have any DDoS protection going into this year and did not believe they had been attacked that frequently. They were hearing about an increase in DDoS attacks targeting peers within their industry. They were also aware that overall DDoS attacks increased 15% this past year and that the volume and size of DDoS attacks increased during the last six months of 2020. However, they didn’t feel they needed DDoS protection as a pharmaceutical company because they weren’t transacting business on a commercial web site, and they had yet to experience any DDoS extortion attempts against them.

The company faced service edge visibility gaps due to business expansion and remote workforce transitions. These service edges included client edges, network edges, and data center service edges. The client edges were expanded virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments supporting thousands of financial services professionals who had moved from corporate facilities to work-from-home (WFH) environments. The network edges had expanded to include a corporate network added through an acquisition that needed to be merged with the company’s infrastructure. The data center service edges included an expanding mix of Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) facilities and an evolving on-premises operation. The IT team was also tasked with gaining better visibility into the company’s market data feeds environment and supporting a Security Operations need to leverage network packet capture to enhance their forensic analysis activities.

The bank was facing the challenge of maintaining service continuity for its online banking applications, teller applications, and other key services. Any disruption to these services could potentially erode customer confidence and loyalty. The bank's IT team needed visibility into the bank’s complex Shared Data Access Network (SDAN) infrastructure to triage and remediate issues. The high volume of traffic in the system often led to stored research data being overwritten before Tier 3 staff could evaluate it, risking possible violation of customer service level agreements (SLAs). Furthermore, the bank was planning for future high-speed connections and data centers, which meant any solution implemented had to support their existing 10GbE infrastructure, yet still be able to handle the 40GbE capacity and the critical services supported in the future.

The U.S.-based global manufacturer was facing high operating expenses due to outdated data centers, costing millions per month. The company needed to consolidate its data centers, implement a software-defined networking solution (SDN), automate services, deploy applications faster, and introduce a cloud strategy to reduce operating expenses (OPEX). One of the biggest challenges was transitioning from four legacy to two new data centers within an extremely tight timeline. Any delays would negatively affect the ability to realize projected cost savings. In addition, the consolidated data center footprint would require an expedited ability to triage any problems. This could result in production services delays and the loss of millions of dollars.

The company’s health and safety management system is critical for not only protecting employees and the environment, but also for maintaining regulatory compliance. This system monitors air, water, and waste management, as well as loss prevention, document management and integration. Much of this relies on “always-on” digital services. This puts IT under significant pressure to be more proactive in ensuring quality and availability of critical services to avoid stiff regulatory fines/penalties which can range into the billions of dollars, and reputational damage with the public. To streamline IT services, the company decided to migrate vital systems to a hybrid cloud environment. It was critical that performance after the move be equal to or better than the existing on premise applications and that they have the ability to address issues quickly. IT needed a way to maintain visibility and assure services before, during and after migration to this new hybrid cloud environment. To achieve this, they needed end-to-end troubleshooting capabilities across the hybrid cloud in order to prove exactly where problems originated, ending time-wasting finger-pointing, and enabling collaboration with third-party vendors to resolve issues quickly.

Fidelity Investments, a multinational financial services giant, faced significant challenges in managing its IT infrastructure. With operations spanning the globe and over 20,000 clients and institutions to service, the company's IT infrastructure had to be robust and provide seamless backend support. The company's online discount brokerage business operation alone has over 140 locations scattered throughout the US, and its website tallies over 21 million unique visitors per month. Moreover, this business-critical information must be accessible 24/7 to not only investors but to other critical internal and external stakeholders as well. Furthermore, information within accounts must be current with up-to-the-minute pricing and financial data. Reliable and integrated communications are also mandatory within the organization and are actually required by the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulation. Beyond the practical requirements of always-on, trouble-free, customer-facing applications, the company’s brand and reputation could be at risk with a publicly-known outage of service. Indeed, in the highly competitive world of financial services, customer service – and services – is paramount. Any semblance of degraded service to its customers will diminish the brand Fidelity has worked so diligently to cultivate.

A large wireless service provider was faced with decreased Net Promoter Score (NPS) due to frequent network issues. This was affecting customer loyalty and internal sales incentives. The challenge was to isolate the chronic network issues and increase the NPS.

The insurance company was facing challenges due to its robust business growth. The Network Management team was soon to be responsible for delivering high-quality network services supporting critical insurance and financial transactions across more than 400 company sites, including local Contact Centers and cross-continent agency locations. The company planned to take advantage of Software Defined Networking (SDN) operating efficiencies by introducing VMware virtualized servers. However, they were experiencing voice slowdowns in the company’s enterprise environment which was impacting the company’s ability to support real-time telephone business with customers. These slowdowns were frustrating and, at times, even professionally embarrassing to the agents responsible for first-level communications with customers. With the acquisition, IT would also be responsible for monitoring Cisco SIP trunking environments at hundreds of local contact center and needed visibility into those locations.

The manufacturer had more than a dozen development centers with varying levels of on-premise data center equipment. The company had deployed a common architecture at the time – hosting most of their core services, like e-mail, unified communications (UC), file sharing, authentication (i.e., Microsoft Active Directory), and customer resource management (CRM) – in the primary data center, with expensive Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) links supporting remote site access. However, this approach had an expensive total cost of ownership, required high touches to maintain, and needed IT professionals to help troubleshoot. The manufacturer needed greater agility in service changes than this deployment allowed them, and they knew IT transformations offered beneficial approaches with significant advantages. Over time, many of their core services had transitioned to cloud and virtual, including Microsoft Office 365 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cisco WebEx collaboration services, SalesForce.com CRM, and ServiceNow service and support software. These new service rollouts were accessed via Internet links at the company’s remote offices.

The U.S. Government agency was facing several challenges. They were looking to upgrade their network bandwidth to support faster 10G and 40G network speeds, which they anticipated would help avoid the adverse performance they occasionally experienced with some of their critical applications. They were also planning to roll out a next-generation Network Operations Center (NOC) to better support the upgraded network, as well as the applications, services, and UC solutions running across that network. Additionally, they wanted to improve Data Center redundancy and disaster recovery prevention by enhancing network visibility at a secondary Data Center that had historically functioned as a “warm” standby site. The agency’s Security Operations (SecOps) team was also engaged in strategic efforts designed to enhance organizational safeguards. They were interested in enhancing their Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Vulnerability Scanning solutions by gaining access to high-value network packet traffic that would improve the efficiency of security forensics activities.

ZTV, a cable television, Internet, and landline telephone service provider in Japan, was facing challenges in maintaining network stability due to increasing DDoS attacks. The company's existing flow collector was unable to accurately detect traffic volume due to the server being overloaded by a large number of small packets. This lack of network stability was jeopardizing customer satisfaction. As the network quality requirements were becoming higher every year, there was a rapid increase in the need for visualization of DDoS attacks, in addition to traffic monitoring and analysis.

The branch of the United States Military was engaged in a major, multi-year data center and digital transformation initiative that touched many aspects of their infrastructure design. With multiple major data centers, 100 remote facilities, migration of key services to Amazon AWS GovCloud, as well as thousands of remote users, providing consistent high-quality availability to critical application services was no small task. Broad, comprehensive, end-to-end application visibility was needed to identify and troubleshoot disruptions, track performance before, during, and after migrations to new data center technologies and /or to the cloud, map service dependencies, and trend end-user experience from all their global locations to the data centers and cloud services to ensure uniformity in security and quality service delivery.