The company was undergoing a transformation of its data center operations, migrating some of its business applications to a cloud-based Nutanix TierPoint co-located (Co-lo) facility. However, they were experiencing visibility limitations that made it difficult to determine whether the migrated applications were performing reliably. They also had visibility limitations into their Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Oracle services, which made it challenging to assure the performance of applications used by guards and personnel to manage on-site operations at correctional and residential facilities. Additionally, the company had been given several months to comply with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) measurements, which required evidence of organizational conformity with safeguards relating to network monitoring for performance and availability, preventing cybersecurity breaches, and protecting client and employee healthcare and financial data.

The biopharma company was undergoing a digital transformation of its services and infrastructure, which required additional visibility. The company needed real-time monitoring of IT service platform transitions and new data center services. The company's technology landscape was frequently changing due to acquisitions, partnerships, and internal growth activities. There were near-term needs to monitor services in transition, including custom application performance and dependencies for apps running on servers being relocated across the enterprise, performance of DNS services migrating to a new hosting data center, and Office 365 performance in an upgraded 10G network environment. The IT provider also needed real-time monitoring of network traffic during data center migration activities, as well as network capacity management forecasting required to assess the need for a wide area network (WAN) upgrade.

The multi-billion-dollar high-tech global manufacturing company was facing a challenge in delivering excellent performance management and monitoring with limited IT resources. The company was investing in the latest technologies and needed to fill gaps in visibility to their complex, evolving network. The company had increased their corporate network from 1 GB to 10 GB in many locations, implemented several Software-as-a-Service applications, including Microsoft® Office 365 and Skype for Business, and upgraded their voice and video services to Polycom. However, issues arose that impacted users and required IT intervention to pinpoint and correct. The resources available to support monitoring and managing their current tools had declined, leading to changes being made that broke the data collection, which caused gaps in visibility.

The company was in the process of implementing several initiatives for digital transformation to optimize business and manufacturing processes as well as internal and external communication. These changes drove the need for Data Center modernization, including upgrading to 40G, migrating to hybrid cloud deployments, and co-locating a portion of their network and applications to a 3rd party site. To support these changes, the IT team needed to deploy new architecture using a new provisioning methodology. They were still confronted with on-going issues affecting users. A few major issues were consuming resources and had the potential to impact business. Of primary concern at the executive level was on-going contact center voice issues with their VoIP service. Although problems were reported regularly, they were not consistent from site to site and not easily resolved.

The company had experienced exponential remote office network changes, with an increase from 50 locations to hundreds of them. To efficiently manage business service delivery to this large-scale remote office network using centralized IT resources, company leadership decided to convert from their hardware-based wide area network (WAN) to a Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). The identified SD-WAN solution involved numerous technology vendors, including VMware, providing VeloCloud SD-WAN, VMware ESXi hypervisor, vRealize Network Insight, and VeloCloud Orchestrator, Avaya Voice Over IP (VoIP) services running at the remote offices, and Universal CPE (uCPE) and Virtual Network Function (VNF) vendor solutions. During standard pre-deployment activities, the IT team began testing the solution, including how the transformed SD-WAN services would support Avaya VoIP business services. The test results they were seeing were problematic, with the VoIP technology not performing reliably over SD-WAN.

The company’s multi-continent business operations footprint includes multiple data center facilities in Europe, Asia, and America. As the pandemic arrived, strategic projects involving Data Center Transformation and MultiCloud Migration were well underway. In this timeframe, IT had to advance strategic project activities, while facing unprecedented remote business service delivery demands. On the strategic side, the IT team was beginning the process of transitioning business applications to the cloud, selecting Microsoft Azure as one of their solution providers. Select data center services were also being migrated to Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) facilities during this timeframe. Tactically, business operations success suddenly became reliant on performance of the company’s virtual private network (VPN). As IT prepared to advance on these strategic and tactical challenges, they quickly found their progress impacted by lack of visibility into an SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application hosted in the company data center environment, Microsoft Azure Cloud-based services and applications, Microsoft Skype for Business (Skype) unified communications (UC) voice and video services, Microsoft Office 365 business applications, Remote applications depending on reliable access to VPN services, Web traffic crucial to Web-based application performance. Existing monitoring toolsets were coming up short. That made it difficult to isolate issues and accurately assign IT ownership. In such scenarios, the Network teams often bear the brunt of finger-pointing, and that was the case here.

The bank's clients have for years enjoyed access to voice-based customer services, with the Call Center operations balanced across two of the company’s regional contact center locations. The Call Centers rely on a multi-vendor environment that includes the following Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) providers: Genesys, Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya. While the IT team was supporting this contact center investment, the bank was managing their business response to COVID-19’s arrival. In safeguarding both clients and employees, the company closed some regional branches, which prompted increased use of remote banking services, including the Call Center. During this time, the Call Center’s staffing approach had also changed, with some of those Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) working at home and others newly relocated into shared office space with other employees. Not only was IT now managing increased use of Call Center resources in this partially remote service delivery environment, they now needed to differentiate whether a service issue related to UC&C technology performance, configuration changes, or a combination of those factors.

The bank was facing several challenges. The functional limitations in the bank’s long-time network performance management (NPM) tools were creating network visibility challenges that prompted technical demands for improvement from the Development, Services, and Infrastructure IT teams. In addition, this legacy NPM technology was not providing the collective IT team with visibility into their local branches necessary for assuring high-quality user experience and efficient financial service delivery. Without clear end-to-end visibility, these IT teams were operating without source data essential to baseline network, application, and business service monitoring. In an environment rich with third-party technology elements and the presence of system integrators, these IT teams needed a reliable monitoring, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis solution to differentiate whether a performance issue stemmed from one of their vendor solutions or in the bank’s internal environment. Along with these day-to-day challenges, an in-progress Data Center Transformation was requiring additional IT cycles to complete. With this project, the network’s core was being migrated to a next-generation technology, with an additional data center location established and a new IT team now responsible for its performance.

The company’s expanded use of remote business locations and digital platforms has transformed the service delivery challenges facing their information technology (IT) team’s leadership. These challenges include expanding visibility needs, enhancing application performance monitoring, managing network bandwidth utilization, and improving IT performance monitoring consistency. With cost containment a strong consideration in this technology refresh, the company wanted innovative solutions and best-practice recommendations regarding how next-generation approaches could address these IT issues and improve insurance and financial services delivery needed to maintain business growth.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic required this bank to close numerous regional branches, prompting leadership to alternatively position 24/7 customer account access through mobile and online applications, as well as telebanking. While customers were using these account access options, many banking employees were now moving their offices to their at-home locations. With increased use of remote business operations, the company’s IT team needed to prioritize the performance of the virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) now critical to successful day-to-day financial service delivery. With millions of global clients now reliant on uninterrupted remote account access, it was critical that remote banking operations work seamlessly. Days after this remote transition began unfolding, IT leadership contacted their NETSCOUT business representatives with concerns about visibility into performance of their Citrix Virtual Applications and Desktops. Citrix was a now-critical environment. The bank’s IT leadership had configured Citrix application traffic to be balanced across several company data centers to help assure performance. However, the local IT team could not visualize Citrix application traffic relevant to their business operations, leaving them unable to monitor this virtual environment or end-user experience.

The resort, part of a major global hospitality and entertainment company, was implementing several data center transformations, including migration to Cisco ACI technology, transition to a Software as a Service application for their reservations application, and enhancements in their contact centers and Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) services for guests speaking with service representatives. During the migration to ACI in their data center, the IT staff needed to troubleshoot a couple of Severity 1 incidents. It was challenging, time-consuming, and put the quality of guests experience at risk. The IT organization quickly recognized the need for in-depth visibility to pinpoint the source of these disruptions.

The communications company operates a network of retail stores for marketing phones, tablets, accessories, as well as cellular phone service and long-term contracts. The company's IT organization has implemented Wi-Fi networks in each of the retail stores for the express purpose of providing connectivity for the sales associates to access Customer Resource Management (CRM) information for consumers coming to the stores; point-of-sale (POS) details for available products and services to sell; Internet access to track competitive offers and access other cloud-based applications; and connectivity to external sites for credit card authorization when completing a sale. The company needed cost-effective visibility into end-user experience at their retail stores for both Wi-Fi and wired access to ensure quality was maintained.

The financial services company was in the final stages of a Data Center Transformation plan, which included consolidating the company’s on-premises data centers and transitioning other technology platforms and application workloads to additional Equinix Co-lo facilities. They were also looking to improve financial services delivery and reduce expenses by better leveraging the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure) multi-cloud environments, as well as expanding regional customer outreach on Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) and Webex voice/video channels to conduct portfolio reviews and shareholder sessions. Furthermore, they needed to assure end-user experience to company workers-at-home who were suddenly relying on formerly underutilized virtual private network (VPN) and Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platforms for business service delivery.

The gaming company has experienced an increase in business during the current pandemic crisis, on top of their natural growth. Some of their data centers generate tens of millions of packets per second that need to be monitored by generating NetFlow data, and forwarding it to multiple security tools, as well as the custom network and application performance tools that have been developed in house. Current monitoring solutions did not provide complete visibility into all traffic. Appliances with much higher traffic capacity than the existing solution were required for NetFlow generation. High-volume participation in multi-player games can draw millions of unique customers. They also have intensive live support from their IT team on the customer facing network, so the packet broker solution needed to scale for many simultaneous staff users as well as with the different data center locations experiencing different growth rates on the customer side.

The company was facing issues with its VoIP system, with users at different locations experiencing varying levels of performance. Key executives and critical remote sites were reporting quality issues. The IT team was unable to establish what was considered 'normal' performance from any specific location, and VoIP issues were often blamed on the network, even when there were server or application issues. The tool IT initially tried to use to monitor the VoIP system required many hours and resources to write custom scripts for each location, which was not scalable for their multiple global locations.

Government agencies in both U.S. and Canada are looking to transform legacy EMS delivery technology to better accommodate today’s mobile, text, imaging, video, and data platforms. As a result, some state, provincial, and local first-responder agencies are rethinking how to better deliver EMS support to residents, including outsourcing technology services to leading thirdparty providers. That is where this leading Call Center company used lessons learned in their other business lines to improve voice and data delivery network support capabilities for police, f ire, and EMT teams. With the high stakes involved in delivering EMS Call Center solutions, the company was committed to offering network carrier-grade voice and data support to help customers improve service delivery. The EMS Call Center would also offer agency customers and their f irst responders a voice over IP (VoIP) switch solution to replace existing telephone exchanges, multimedia call processing and a unified call flow, with intelligent call routing based on employee skill sets and a customizable user interface.

The National Tax Agency was facing challenges in delivering government financial processing services on a national scale. The agency had outsourced operations of numerous vendor technology platforms to a trusted managed service provider (MSP), including voice and Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) solutions operating at 10 government locations and numerous Contact Centers supporting the public. The MSP team used several vendor solutions to help monitor Contact Center service performance, and when they reviewed the application performance monitoring (APM) tool they had been using to assure UC technology, they saw problematic shortcomings. These included limited UC performance metrics for Cisco voice, video, and collaboration services, a lack of visibility into the network as an important element of overall UC performance, an inability to visualize and monitor agency traffic in cloud environments, and lack of visibility into east-west network traffic within the agency’s internal environment.

The global manufacturing company was facing challenges with the quality and performance of voice services through their Contact Centers, including during the migration to SIP trunking technologies. They lacked visibility to identify the source of problems with QoS across their complex environment. The IT department had inherited responsibility for all IT monitoring in North and South America, which led to specific issues monitoring VoIP. They were already experiencing call issues because QoS tagging was inconsistent across different regions, and IT lacked the visibility necessary to identify where the changes originated. They used multiple tools for Voice monitoring, which required resource-intensive, time-consuming research, that in turn, led to unacceptably long times to troubleshoot issues.

The company, a Fortune 500 technology manufacturer and services provider, was facing intermittent issues impacting their SaaS collaboration services. They wanted to ensure these issues were addressed in their earliest stages of development to assure their customers received the same flawless, high-quality experience they had come to enjoy from this popular provider. These challenges were further complicated by the very nature of the service – at times, there could be hundreds of thousands of simultaneous call volumes; 40 GB high- speed links; a variety of different voice, video and data applications; and the need to monitor and analyze not just the call set-up protocols, but also the media traffic and call quality metrics.

The North American Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) was facing challenges in improving visibility from their data center hub into DMV branch and user operations. The underlying network, application, and voice environment needed to run optimally to avoid delays that could result in longer lines, frustrated customers, and adverse publicity. The IT team was also facing the challenge of implementing and maintaining Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) and Microsoft Office 365 technology rollouts without a service assurance technology solution approach.

The global Contact Center Services Provider (CCSP) was expanding its business and increasing the number of company-owned Data Center and Call Center locations in their network. They also started using regional third-party co-location facilities to quickly establish Contact Center platforms for new clients. As part of their ongoing business expansion, the company’s Infrastructure Solutions Architecture (ISA) team wanted to standardize on a bill of materials (BOM) for new Contact Center clients. They wanted to extend this BOM concept to standardize on the visibility and monitoring platform they were using for these new Contact Center clients. The team had earlier realized quick advancements in improving voice infrastructure performance for previous Call Center clients by using a production-level NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform for Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C), network, and application performance management.

The global Contact Center Services Provider (CCSP) was tasked with managing a customer-facing, next-generation Cisco Webex platform for a government agency. The agency was transitioning their Unified Communications (UC) Call Center technology platform to an outsourced service model due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic had caused an increase in unemployed workers and those transitioning to remote office environments, escalating the need to provide citizens with uninterrupted remote access to this critical federal government support program. The CCSP had to establish this new contact center platform in an unusually short timeframe.

The business process outsourcer (BPO) and a leading Unified Communications (UC) technology provider had a strategic partnership to bundle their voice and video technology solutions as part of Contact Center services builds hosted by the BPO on behalf of their customers. However, the growing cloud-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution marketplace presented a new challenge. Many commercial and government organizations are moving to such CCaaS solutions, as these outsourced Call Center services offer quicker deployment, greater flexibility, and reduced IT operations. The UC company wanted to enter the CCaaS market and expand its business reach. They sought partners capable of reliably hosting CCaaS platforms configured to support large-scale enterprise and government customers with millions of potential annual call center client exchanges, as many as 40,000 concurrent user sessions for each service pod established for individual end customers, a vendor-agnostic approach for real-time monitoring of diverse business applications, and smart visibility solutions that would provide end-to-end views from the BPO contact centers hosting the UC technology to the customers and citizens accessing the CCaaS.

The healthcare network was experiencing a dramatic increase in home-based workforce traffic due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to quality issues with services through Azure and their telemedicine application, which was experiencing choppy voice and video, as well as losing calls in the middle of sessions. The healthcare network had recently migrated services to carrier neutral facilities (CNF) and had not yet deployed visibility into the three new Equinix locations, making troubleshooting the reported issues both challenging and time-consuming.

The biotech company was facing high costs and lack of control due to dependence on 3rd party-hosted applications. The decision was made to implement a performance hub project for their hundreds of remote locations. They used Cisco® Secure Agile Exchange (SAE), which enables enterprises to interconnect users to applications quickly and securely by virtualizing the network edge (DMZ) and extending it to colocation centers. All the 3rd party applications, as well as some applications hosted at internal data centers, were brought “in-house” to 10-15 colocation facilities and all the company remote locations will point to these colocations. A key goal of the project was to ensure the SaaS and internal applications were available to end users after the move to the colocation centers. IT knew they needed visibility from the user perspective, to ensure the new approach was working as designed with high-quality application availability and performance.

The customer, a leading supplier of enterprise software solutions, was struggling to keep up with the demand in one of their test labs. They used patch panels to create network topologies specific to each test scenario. However, this method was error-prone and required frequent physical access to the test lab. The patch panels were prone to problems such as connecting a cable to the wrong port, cable failure at the connector, and dirty connectors leading to intermittent problems during testing. The patch panels quickly became disorganized, increasing the likelihood of errors and failures. The test lab was located two floors away from the engineers, resulting in a loss of time for each round trip.

The insurance company had already deployed the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG and vSTREAM data sources, which helped their IT team to address visibility and application performance issues in their Microsoft Azure cloud environment, improve end-user experience with a public-facing Web portal supporting patient and subscriber transactions, and close other network visibility gaps across the business. However, new priorities emerged that shifted attention across this dynamic IT environment. They faced rolling digital transformation projects and the sudden remote workforce transition. They quickly realized virtual environment visibility gaps were impacting applications relying on VMware ESX and Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies for high-quality business service delivery. These issues meant IT could not visualize Web-based applications used for claims edit system, contract modeling, automated claims pricing, and automated bundled payments processing. This Web-based application environment additionally included a HIPAA gateway for automated processing of electronic transactions in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also requiring secure processing of personal health information (PHI).

The government agency was undergoing digital transformation projects which included rolling out a cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 service and establishing operations at two Equinix Co-lo data centers. The agency needed additional visibility and real-time monitoring for these new platforms. The IT team was aware that without additional nGenius InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources, they would lack real-time monitoring of these new platforms. The ISNG technology would need to support 40G network speeds and provide additional storage for as-needed packet captures and post-incident troubleshooting. The project had a tight schedule.

SdV Plurimedia, a leading hosting and Web services provider in France, is held to strict contractual obligations and service level agreements (SLAs) that require it to provide the highest level of data center infrastructure and customer service protection. A majority of SdV’s customers offer public-facing media services that require high performance and 100% uptime. SdV’s customer Web sites are frequently attack targets due to the public and sometimes controversial nature of their content. Therefore, it is common for SdV to see attacks on a daily basis. These attacks not only impact the target customer, but also other customers who share the same data center resources. It’s these types of attacks that would shut down SdV if they didn’t have a DDoS mitigation system in place.

Foreshore Limited, a leading provider of hosting, messaging, storage, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and other Internet services to the offshore business world, needed to maintain 100 percent Internet connectivity to optimize quality of service and enhance traffic engineering. The company’s non-stop network infrastructure is meeting the rigorous 24/7 operational requirements of international banks, major e-retailers and electronic payment providers. Foreshore backs its services with 100 percent service level agreements and a six-year track record of no downtime. In an era of global network security threats that are ever-increasing in size and frequency, DDoS detection and mitigation are critical to Foreshore’s continued success and that of its customers.