Netregistry, Australia’s largest provider of domain names and one of the most trusted Web hosts for small business, was facing an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, particularly recent Domain Name System (DNS) reflection attacks. The company provides multiple services—including domain registry, Web hosting and Web design—to more than 500,000 clients. As a hosting provider, Netregistry is no stranger to DDoS attacks and had many processes already in place for handling them. However, the increase in attacks prompted the company to seek help from an outside provider. Netregistry evaluated a number of companies and outsourcing providers that offer DDoS protection services. However, these companies typically only scrub traffic for a single domain name, which was not feasible for Netregistry due to its large and varied customer base.

OB Design, a leading online fashion retailer in Taiwan, began experiencing invalid traffic flowing into the company’s network during peak hours every night, increasing server workload. This traffic appeared legal, leading the company to add more hosts to keep pace with the growing network demand. However, when it became clear that the increased traffic was not generating a corresponding rise in orders, OB Design realized it was under attack by hackers. The company's initial approach of reviewing the traffic history of each previous day, searching for suspicious IP traffic, and building a blacklist for the firewall proved too time-consuming and ineffective.

Easynet Limited, a global, IP-based managed services organization, was facing the challenge of managing, protecting, and supporting a rapidly growing worldwide IP services network. The company provides network, hosting, and telepresence solutions to multinational corporations and has over 3,000 customers and eight million end users utilizing one million network connections to its global IP backbone. The company was experiencing significant growth in its transit and peering business, making it increasingly complex to manually conduct traffic management and peering analysis using in-house tools. Additionally, due to Easynet’s global IP backbone, DDoS attacks were a regular occurrence, especially for some of its bigger hosting customers, such as betting/gaming sites that are prime targets for DDoS attacks.

Comcast Corporation, a leading media, entertainment, and communications company, was faced with the challenge of transitioning its network and services from IPv4 to IPv6. This transition was necessitated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) distributing the last five blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Comcast had to ensure the technological readiness of its entire network and service infrastructure, including core network readiness, support for IPv6 across the back-office systems, and access network IPv6 readiness.

The customer, a central European network service provider (NSP) that offers Internet access, domain name system (DNS), IP address allocation and DDoS attack detection and mitigation services to universities, ministries and research organizations, was using Cisco Guard for DDoS attack detection and mitigation. However, they faced two main problems with Cisco Guard. Firstly, the NSP had a 10 Gbps core backbone network, but Cisco Guard only supported 1.2 Gbps of mitigation, and there were no plans to improve this due to the end-of-sale schedule. Secondly, because the NSP used Peakflow SP for attack detection and Cisco Guard for attack mitigation, its staff was forced to learn two different user interfaces, which made attack mitigation more difficult.

The company’s acquisition of another agricultural business located continents away offered the commercial benefits of expanded market reach and production capacity. However, the acquisition also presented new information technology (IT) demands that needed to be addressed quickly. For example, the acquired company’s IT operations were managed by Help Desk resources and local technicians unequipped to meet the expanding monitoring demands of this now-global company. Wanting to reduce rather than expand their data center operations footprint, the decision was made migrate the acquired company’s business services into a regional Equinix co-lo facility. While this decision offered efficiencies and cost containment to the company, the Equinix site had not yet been instrumented for real-time monitoring of the transitioning agricultural business services. The parent company needed to assure business and service continuity before, during, and after the data center migration and required visibility and performance analytics to do so.

The metropolitan police agency was facing a challenge of upgrading and consolidating their data center with a new Cisco ACI SDN architecture. The agency uses NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to continuously monitor high-speed fiber connections running from data centers to the city’s police stations. However, network and application performance delays are unacceptable in any enterprise environment. For police officers on the front lines, however, performance anomalies in the radio network or crucial laptop law enforcement applications can truly translate to life-and-death matters. The agency’s Network Operations team made the strategic decision to take advantage of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) solution to simplify their future data center operations. This solution enables the agency to support a new generation of distributed applications over existing physical and virtualized environments. Simultaneously, they planned to consolidate data center operations.

The global fashion retailer was facing frequent outages and slowdowns within their e-commerce site, as well as issues affecting point-of-sale (POS) payment authorizations. These issues threatened to harm the reputation of the business and negatively impact company revenues. The network operations team was struggling with chronic network outages and high mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The homegrown monitoring tools lacked sufficient visibility into application, network, and VoIP performance, leaving IT in a bind. Retail store operations and supply chain partners were being adversely affected, leaving IT spending too much time in the war room trying to uncover the root cause of the issues.

The utility company had outsourced select IT operations to third-party providers, including corporate network oversight. However, there were disparities in the quality of performance analytics and troubleshooting provided by the two IT teams. The grid IT team was using the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform to manage high-quality service delivery for its grid network. But when an issue traversed to the corporate network, the third-party IT team experienced challenges and lengthy delays trying to identify root cause. As a result, they were not providing comparable intelligence in the joint War Room sessions, which led to the grid IT team being called in to help resolve issues within the corporate network.

The centralized State government information technology (IT) organization faced everyday challenges of managing their large-scale, complex government service delivery environment. Now, IT leadership faced additional cybersecurity and network demands, including those described in the subsections that follow. They had to support Federal Cybersecurity Program Requirements and sustain hybrid workforce operations and user experience. They also had to enhance security operations intelligence into new data center operations.

The company was undergoing a strategic Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) technology transition when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Voice Team was tasked with overseeing a business-critical transition from Cisco Call Manager directly to a Microsoft Teams Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution. The importance of this rollout was heightened by employees’ readiness to leverage the expanded MS Teams video conferencing, chat, voice, and other collaboration tools to replace the face-to-face meetings they used to have with clients and colleagues. As the company’s open-ended hybrid workforce transition continued, the Voice Team had also encouraged multi-vendor UCaaS technology use on employee-preferred platforms, including Cisco Webex and Zoom, in addition to Teams. This added further complexity to the Voice Team’s UC&C visualization and real-time monitoring efforts.

The healthcare technology company faced the challenge of delivering a SaaS service consistently, to thousands of healthcare locations worldwide, problem-free, around the clock. Broad visibility was also a challenge for this healthcare technology company. Managing the performance of their global, multi-cloud environment was under the control of the IT organization. However, their customers accessed the services over an infinite number of paths from their own hospitals, campuses, and medical buildings, over different ISPs, that might be routed differently every time. Troubleshooting the true source of log-in problems or a slow response time issue for customers without proper visibility was daunting, if not impossible.

The hospital network had gone through significant changes over the last decade, from both organic patient growth and strategic mergers and acquisitions. There are thousands of physicians, nurses, and staff administering care to hundreds of thousands of inpatient, outpatient, and emergency room patients every year. With more than a dozen hospitals and a hundred medical facilities, this hospital network is one of the largest in its region and essential to the healthcare of its community. The dependency on their networked applications, including electronic medical records (EMR) and imaging services, can’t be overstated. Their IT team is dedicated to delivering network, application, security, and performance tools that support these healthcare professionals. With one goal in mind – speedy, safe, secure, and efficient delivery of patient care services, the Information Technology (IT) team at this healthcare plays a pivotal role in delivering digital transformations to meet the evolving needs of the hospital organization. Their planned data center transformation was their latest effort to take their technology and applications to a new level in support of patient care services.

The agency has split the hosting of their well-known business and custom agency applications between their private data center and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Employees, wherever they are located, are connecting to the applications via the closest Equinix co-location (co-lo) facility where the agency has deployed mostly access technology, including Internet Switch links (ISLs) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) gateways. From the co-los, employee traffic is sent to the location where the application in use is hosted. Some software as a service applications (SaaS) are also in use, such as Salesforce.com. This complex, hybrid cloud environment supports significant agency business for the public’s benefit and safety. Constant availability and consistent performance, for all users, accessing from anywhere, through any of the co-los, to any application was the challenge for the NetOps team.

The pharmaceutical company was planning a global rollout of Microsoft Teams, including Contact Center operations. However, they faced visibility gaps in identifying early MS Teams voice quality issues, particularly in the Executive Suite. The company's application- and PC-based telephony services would be run on MS Teams. The transition was designed to minimize impact to on-site business operations at corporate locations involved in this desktop voice migration to MS Teams. The company also had a 99.999% uptime service level agreement (SLA) with Microsoft to assure high-quality MS Teams performance. After the first phase of the MS Teams transition, IT Operations experienced an unexpected uptick in IT trouble tickets from the company executives due to voice quality performance issues.

The company was facing a high-profile migration to a new ERP system. Service degradations impacting employees and customers were taking too long to resolve due to lack of proactive, in-depth visibility for network and application troubleshooting. Server monitoring tools used in the past had been found to be completely reactive, used only after employees or customers had already notified IT that problems existed. Senior leadership identified excessive problem resolution time as a major disruption, effecting both internal users and external customers. It was simply taking far too long to rectify issues without meaningful visibility.

The government organization was involved in a new, private data center project that would be used to host all the applications and network connectivity necessary for employees and contractors to perform their strategic and tactical day-to-day operations and for citizens to interact with the agency. The challenge was simple - new network, new communications tools, new business applications – and it would require new visibility to assure quality delivery of the services. This IT staff represents one of the most experienced groups of professionals assembled and knows even the best designed and deployed network environment will have disruptions that will impact their applications and communications. It was part of their best-practices strategy to plan for this, so they could proactively mitigate that risk with proactive visibility, monitoring, and analysis.

The government agency was tasked with meeting national cybersecurity mandates and improving network, virtual, remote, and data center visibility and agency operations. The agency's Security Operations (SecOps) team had to reconsider their long-time Network Performance Management (NPM) strategy, which relied on vendor tools that used NetFlow, MIB-II, and SNMP as data sources for analysis, post-incident troubleshooting, and forensic security efforts. The operation of nGenius 5000 Series PFS appliances in the agency environment helped increase SecOps’ awareness of potentially expanding the use of packet-based data sources to improve their monitoring and troubleshooting activities.

The energy company's technology infrastructure for assuring high-quality utility service delivery to millions of their customers depended on a multi-tier, multi-vendor environment. This included in-house IT specialists, Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) resources, Microsoft Azure Cloud services, and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud solution. The company's workforce transition added to IT's increased reliance on multi-vendor solutions running in remote locations to assure employee access to critical business services. However, the IT team did not have end-through-end visibility and real-time analysis, which are essential for assuring 7x24 operations and successful troubleshooting when issues occur. As a result, the emergence of Help Desk tickets identifying user-reported issues with Office 365 business email access and MS Teams collaboration support services became problematic. The BPO's reluctance to provide packet captures (PCAPs) generated from the network traffic traversing the data center environment they managed on the company’s behalf further complicated these challenges.

The company, a multi-billion dollar, publicly traded company that has been supplying devices and services to its customers for more than a century, was planning a strategic initiative to build out their private network and data centers into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, they realized there would be a gap in service assurance visibility, which could present issues with customer satisfaction and user experience. The IT goal was to incorporate network and application performance analysis and visibility for this new environment that would equal what they had in the current infrastructure.

The large public school district, with over a hundred separate buildings and tens of thousands of students, faced the challenge of assuring a high-quality learning experience for students and faculty during on-campus and hybrid learning. The district needed to provide troubleshooting visibility throughout the network infrastructure for quick resolution of security, network, and/or application issues to improve Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). The district also had to prepare for the possibility of returning to remote instruction at any time due to weather conditions or other circumstances. The IT staff at the district was tasked with upgrading the monitoring of network operations and applications within the local area network and linking their other facilities. The district needed to balance the creative efforts of the IT teams and financial resources across the district’s whole infrastructure.

The company’s insurance delivery, subscriber needs, and employee experience were all vastly changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Insurance business volume had increased to more than 40 million annual transactions. Nearly 5,000 employees had transitioned from on-premises locations to work-from-home (WFH) environments, including a vast population of Call Center Agents. With more WFH employees, the network and application monitoring effort now included an expanded remote/client service edge of the network that had not yet been instrumented with NETSCOUT smart visibility sources. Similarly, the network edge had expanded to include cloud edges associated with recently completed moves to Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) data centers, Microsoft Azure and Oracle multi-cloud services, and a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) architecture. With blind spots across numerous network edges and on-the-move user and technology services, the IT team was further challenged when outages increased and Help Desk tickets took longer to close.

The customer, a large public school district, was facing an increased volume of cyber attacks during mandated testing periods. The Security Operations (SecOps) team was seeking a Network Detection and Response solution to increase their network visibility and quickly investigate and mitigate any questionable activity. They were particularly interested in changes in traffic behavior during testing periods when bad actors, potentially even students, attempt to take down the environment to avoid taking the tests.

The company had deployed a vendor’s productivity and process control solution that offered Human-Machine Interface (HMI) technology to connect plant floor operators to production-level manufacturing systems. In addition, this vendor technology offered Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) support to manufacturing operations. In supporting this solution, the manufacturer used hundreds of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) across plant floors to support their factory automation efforts. However, one performance issue that impacted the vendor productivity and process control solution proved difficult to resolve. In responding to related plant floor operators’ support requests, IT Operators saw performance latency in the productivity and process control technology was responsible for manufacturing delays, but they were unable to identify root cause despite their best efforts to do so.

The healthcare company was facing challenges with its existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, which was not meeting their needs. They required a solution that supported high bandwidth, low latency, and secure transactions. They also wanted a network that was prepared to handle the future workload of proactive patient monitoring, remote diagnostics with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and AR/VR (Augmented/Virtual Reality) based training. The company needed a secure, low latency, higher bandwidth private 5G solution and turned to NETSCOUT for the nGeniusONE, nGenius Session Analyzer (nSA), TrueCall and nGenius Business Analytics (nBA) toolsets. This provided them end-through-end visibility to all healthcare facilities, and services, across multiple locations in major U.S. cities.

The financial company was undergoing several business technology transitions, including migrating regional Voice Over IP (VoIP) Contact Center technology operations to a Co-located (Co-lo) data center and outsourcing regional primary data center operations to a managed security service provider (MSSP). These changes prompted a reexamination of IT’s long-time commitment to Cisco NetFlow data as the basis for post-incident investigation activities. Advanced Unified Communications (UC) analytics in the Contact Center Co-lo were seen as a needed enhancement, given the increased importance of voice communication exchanges for high-quality customer service experience during the COVID-19 era. The company needed additional visibility across IT operations, as well as the suitability of a NetFlow-only approach to day-to-day incident response.

The IT department of a U.S. state was managing a suite of network and application resources for use by all other departments and agencies of the state for communication and business operations. To meet the growing demands of their stakeholders for modernization of networking resources, the CIO and IT teams began implementing an ambitious digital transformation (DX) strategy that included the construction of new data centers, the closure of others, and increasing cloud services. The intended effect was to improve efficiency and security for government agencies and a distributed workforce. The IT organization quickly realized that to succeed in their DX and modernization initiatives, they also needed to improve their network and application visibility strategy in data centers, extend it to the cloud, and improve services, security, and troubleshooting across the board. The complexity of integrating hybrid infrastructures coupled with migrations to and from other data centers and colocation facilities, cloud services, and security, were hurdles to streamlining operations. Balancing IT resource allocation and implementing reliable private and public cloud backup and recovery solutions were also considerations to future growth plans.

The county’s many departments are often collaborating, requiring constant communication and reliable internet and data center services that are accessible from any location. Real-time testing to measure network and application performance across their infrastructure is critical to maintain business continuity. The county leverages nGenius® Enterprise Performance Management solutions to proactively monitor, test, and troubleshoot performance challenges in the following areas: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), SD-WAN, Bandwidth performance, Internet connections, Applications, UCaaS.

The company's IT team was engaged in several critical digital transformation projects including investing in Equinix colocation (colo) operations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to bring IT services closer to their remote offices worldwide, which ultimately delivers better service performance to the local employees. They were also leveraging cloud peering connections in Equinix colos with AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute. The company’s individual business entities that depend on the IT organization for their connectivity and applications demand high quality service, often backed by service level agreements. With private data centers in the Americas and digital transformations involving colocation implementations and migrations to AWS cloud, this IT team recognized the need for visibility throughout their distributed ecosystem for ensuring proactive monitoring and troubleshooting to maintain employee productivity and revenue-generating, business activities.

The manufacturer was undergoing a significant digital transformation, migrating parts of its legacy hybrid environment to colocation facilities to support faster, more localized connectivity and larger cloud workloads. They also sought to reduce costs, increase security, and prepare for future modernizations. The migration to co-lo facilities quickly became a blind spot in their visibility strategy. To minimize and avoid disruptions, the project required pervasive visibility and instrumentation before, during, and after the migration for inbound and outbound traffic at the private cloud, at the co-lo edge, and at regional offices where users sit.