Williams, a large-scale energy infrastructure company, had been allowing its employees to use cloud services without a security stamp of approval. This led to a lack of visibility into the number of cloud services in use across the enterprise and the associated risks. The company was spending too many man hours assessing the security of cloud services when employees requested a new service. They were unable to enforce policies and ensure compliance without impacting the user experience. The company needed a solution to gain visibility into the cloud services being used, understand the risks, and enforce policies without affecting productivity.

Equinix, a technology company, was facing challenges in identifying the cloud services being used by its employees. The process of approving new cloud services was time-consuming, requiring about 30 person-hours of due diligence by a small staff of three security experts. The team had to manually verify security practices and assess risk factors, which was taxing. Additionally, they lacked tools to manage log files focusing on cloud services risks. The company needed a tool that could discover and identify all cloud services in use, reduce the time and cost of vetting cloud services, provide anomaly detection to spot behaviors that likely indicated data leakage, and prevent access to high-risk cloud services.

Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona and the fourth largest in the United States, faced several challenges in managing its vast network of users and data. The county's Chief Information Officer, David Stevens, wanted to fully understand and govern where their data was going and who had access to it, as it was essential to maintaining the agency’s security. The county faced challenges such as insufficient blocking of malware and high-risk services due to proxy categorization of services based on URL. The county's vast existing infrastructure required frictionless integration across multiple solutions and business units for core functionality. Furthermore, the county lacked visibility into cloud use and risk, data access, and traffic.

Steelcase, a Fortune 1000 organization with 6,500 remote access workers across the globe, was facing challenges due to the rapid adoption of cloud services. This led to multiple accounts, passwords, and login procedures, which increased the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive company information. The growth of shadow cloud services, unmanaged by the IT department, also posed a significant risk. The company wanted to enable cloud services like Office 365 while ensuring sensitive data is protected. Two years prior, the Steelcase Board of Directors’ Audit Committee had expressed concern over the vast amount of cloud applications and services in use at the company and requested an audit, which required finding, vetting and approval of all cloud services.

Perrigo, a global pharmaceutical company, was facing challenges with its existing procedures which led to inconsistent cloud security policy enforcement and created risk of data exfiltration. The backlog of cloud service approval requests from employees inhibited productivity. The lack of visibility into cloud service providers in use prohibited proactive cloud enablement. The company needed granular visibility into what their users were doing and the ability to provide policy controls for different business units. They needed to gain complete visibility into cloud usage, proactively block high-risk services, and increase detection of high-risk behavioral anomalies.

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 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 financial services company was evolving a large scale multi-vendor Unified Communications (UC) rollout. The multi-step process to deliver advanced real-time communication services to the over 40 operations centers offered improved cost savings, reduced transaction time, and increased efficiency. The primary concerns of the key stakeholders responsible for the implementation were successful deployment and investment protection; minimizing the cost of ownership was important as well. IT management tasked the operations team with the development of a Video Quality Project roadmap, which outlined the processes, tool sets and hurdles impacting the initiative. The goal was to allow the video team to evolve the current reactive process to a proactive process in the identification, notification, troubleshooting and resolution of video quality issues.

The leading sector index options trading firm and one of the largest liquidity providers in Exchange Traded Funds was facing challenges with their network performance. The network regularly experienced traffic bursts which caused retransmissions and delayed transaction speeds. Their existing historical reporting tools offered only five- or fifteen-minute averaging, which did not provide the granularity needed to see when and where these spikes were occurring or to determine the cause of these threshold violations. In addition, troubleshooting was tedious and frustrating as the tool could only capture packets on demand, making it challenging to catch intermittent problems in action. The need for millisecond-level visibility into market data transactions drove the move to permanently instrument key locations to provide a unified, end-to-end approach to evaluating application performance and latency issues.

The financial services company had implemented third-party packet flow switches in their production environment to send network traffic to security tools and NETSCOUT’s service assurance solution. However, when one of the packet flow switches experienced an internal Tap failure, a critical link hosting one of the company’s customer-facing websites was lost. This outage not only impeded visibility to traffic for service assurance and security monitoring during that period, but it also exposed a point of failure in their architecture. The switch’s vendor provided poor customer support, suggesting that IT move line cards for the time being while removing the failed one to send back for repair. This led the IT team to seek a different solution and vendor.

The Asian environmental protection agency is highly dependent on Lotus Notes for virtually all communications – email, scheduling, document sharing, etc. When Notes is slow, productivity and collaboration grind to a halt. IT needed to improve service delivery and implement tools to respond to issues more quickly. Prior to implementing the nGenius® solution, IT was forced to search through router/switch logs, ask the service provider to check their logs, compare logs, guess at the source of the problem and then verify that the proposed solution worked. The process was tedious, time consuming and error prone.

As the organization continued to grow across different regions of the United States, IT recognized that its data centers needed to be prepared to handle the increased business demands the new business would bring. To stay competitive in today’s robust insurance environment, the company understood it was imperative to deliver innovative, state-of-the-art service to its customers. To meet this vital need, IT faced the challenge of smoothly and seamlessly transitioning to its next-generation high-speed data centers which introduced a 40GbE backbone and SDN technology as their foundation. In order to support the company’s existing portfolio of insurance services and deliver new business critical applications to employees and independent agents, IT also needed the ability to proactively predict and prevent user-impacting performance issues. This meant pre-deployment testing of new services was imperative, so IT could ensure service assurance once in production.

The IT teams responsible for supporting the company’s global voice and video infrastructure faced significant challenges due to the high volume of communication outages, dropped calls, and poor call quality within call centers and across its numerous retail stores. With thousands of inbound calls from customers seeking technical support, new product sales and internal conversations, supporting the company’s existing Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking deployment proved problematic. These unified communication (UC) issues led to a noticeable drop in customer satisfaction scores, which have long been a strategic pillar of the company’s iconic brand. Since converting to a SIP trunked topology, IT has struggled to triage and isolate connection issues and voice quality problems, even after a wholesale upgrade of all of their Session Border Controllers (SBCs). A variety of voice groups were tasked with routing calls through their aggregated SIP trunks, but because each group utilized different troubleshooting tools, there was a severe lack of correlation and communication across groups, which created inadequate and inefficient problem resolution.

The company, a leading European-based manufacturer of home and industrial appliances, was looking for ways to automate and optimize the management of their service delivery environment by predicting and preventing service-effecting problems, rather than reacting to user calls to the help desk. The company supports a large, highly dispersed organization with an extremely complex network that utilizes dozens of different WAN service providers. Any workflow interruption can back up or even shut down the manufacturing floor, impacting a well-tuned just-in-time inventory management process.

The software company was facing significant disruptions in its Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions. The corporate IT team was struggling to isolate and resolve domain problems due to the use of several dozen monitoring and troubleshooting tools. This resulted in a high degree of inefficiency and was costing the company over $1 million in maintenance expenses. The company lacked a single, viable tool for network and application service assurance of the entire enterprise, making it difficult to quickly identify the root cause of UC&C disruptions and resolve them in a timely manner. The company aimed to fill the gap in UCC visibility, improve operational efficiency, and drive cost savings through consolidation and standardization of monitoring tools.

The company was facing bandwidth issues across its extensive global network, impacting user experience and potentially threatening business activities. With the construction of a new global headquarters and the introduction of new services, the IT team needed to ensure the network could handle the demands of technology development, manufacturing, cloud services, and retail sales and service. The wide area network (WAN) operations team needed visibility into the specific business services in use and the QoS classes assigned between data centers, headquarters, retail locations and manufacturing areas in order to achieve more effective capacity planning and respond more quickly to network changes.

Unified Communications (UC) tools promise to provide web and video conferencing, instant messaging, voice, desktop and data sharing across multiple devices and media with exceptional user experience. However, the performance of UC applications is highly dependent on the infrastructure that it runs on. Problems within this IT environment will degrade UC performance and it can happen anywhere and at any time. Common problems include quality of service (QoS)/DSCP mismatch, signaling failures such as errors between the call server and session border controller over a SIP trunk, Active Directory not configured correctly, packet loss and jitter. UC users thus experience poor call quality, call and video latency delays, one-way audio, grainy video, or static noise during video conferencing.

The law firm, with its global presence and over 3,000 legal professionals, needed to maintain application and business service visibility across its geographically dispersed network. This included two data centers, 23 remote offices, and over 3,000 corporate users. The firm required fast, reliable access to information and clients on a 24/7 worldwide basis. They also needed to deploy a single, unified service management solution that captures, stores, retrieves, and analyzes network, application, and service delivery data. The firm's success was based on its ability to help clients consistently meet their legal and business objectives on a timely and cost-effective basis. Therefore, speed and uptime were critical to keeping clients happy and the staff fully productive. The firm also utilized several applications that assist in the storage, retrieval, and management of litigation materials. Information had to be readily available across the firm through the Internet, the corporate intranet, a networked litigation support system, and computerized databases of firm documents, library resources, and business intelligence systems.

The company's network is responsible for handling billions of transactions per day and any disruptions and performance degradation to database searches on their website results in lost revenue. In fact, site performance is so important to the business that IT staff bonuses are only paid when 99.985% uptime is maintained. Because internal systems and applications were not equipped to send alarms or report on issues, IT operations team members were strictly reactive in addressing network problems that would arise. When customers started to experience slow response times and connections to partner sites began to fail, IT was faced with the challenge of pinpointing the source of the problem. By the time trouble tickets were escalated to the more knowledgeable first level operations team, the damage was already done in terms of revenue loss and harm to the company’s reputation.

The car rental company's revenues are primarily driven by web bookings and sales, which are derived from partnerships with third-party travel and leisure sites that provide rates, availability and reservations to retail customers. The challenge faced by IT is that if the third-party travel and leisure sites don’t see quotes within 1.5 seconds, the company loses its ability to bid for customer business - losing out on bookings and revenue. The application environment is highly complex requiring multiple systems to work efficiently. For example, in order to respond to customer queries and provide accurate pricing information, the web application performs multiple database lookups to search inventory and determine the right pricing based on availability. Unfortunately, the transactions were taking too long to process. Further complicating the matter, the application performance was degraded after IT migrated from physical servers to virtual environments. The network operations team was unable to quickly determine the root cause of the outages, making it difficult to resolve. With the potential for poor partner support, poor customer experience, and ultimately, lost revenue, response time degradations were having a very real impact on the company’s bottom line.

The company’s infrastructure includes a complex network of offices, call centers and data centers that span five continents, as well as 40 cruise ships constantly on the move. With this globally distributed network, the company faces IT service delivery challenges that are unique within its industry. In addition to managing shore-side operations, the company has to ensure that 40 cruise ships, with each having its own campus of thousands of users, is able to communicate with headquarters as well as being capable of operating independently. It is absolutely crucial to business operations that the company’s network, whether satellite or terrestrial, be able to deliver business-critical applications and services at any given time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. An important organizational initiative is using technology to drive down internal and external communications costs. In order to reduce its telephony costs for both incoming calls from customers as well as internal communications, the company has moved to IP-based UC.

US Airways needed to optimize and ensure the performance of its online reservation and information services it provides to customers. To manage the performance of this critical business asset more tightly, US Airways’ IT organization realized it required a comprehensive understanding of the applications and networks supporting their Web sites. The airline’s existing SNMP-based reporting tools were unable to provide the detailed, comprehensive views of the networks and applications supporting the corporate Web sites. The company first looked to NetScout when it was bringing management of the reservation website in-house from an outsourcer.

Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL) is a major utility company that serves a population of 2.6 million people in the north east of England with water and sewerage services, and 1.8 million in the south east of England where it provides water services trading as Essex & Suffolk Water. The company is recognized as a sector leader in its industry. The NWL application network plays a critical role in the company’s success, and is substantial in scope. The infrastructure base consists of three data centers, two in the north and one in the south, connected by IPoDWDM fiber connections. The data centers and NWL business office locations are interconnected by more than 50 separate WAN links, varying in bandwidth from 256Kbps to 10/100 Ethernet. More than 2,000 employees use the network, which is supported by a mix of equipment from multiple vendors, including Cisco (LAN, WAN), Nortel (LAN), and Siemens (VoIP). Primary business applications that depend on the network include desktops using the Microsoft Office suite, Citrix clients, and the company’s IP-based voice communications system. The network and service infrastructure also supports Northumbrian Water’s web presence, which is the information and contact portal for its 4.4 million customers.

The mobile operator was in the process of implementing its LTE test network prior to a full production rollout across its operating area. They were making a considerable investment in capital, spectrum resources and engineering time to deploy LTE, and it was critical to fully test the network prior to carrying live traffic. They saw LTE as an important part of its ongoing long-term strategy in bringing 4G speeds to the markets it served. However, they experienced a latency problem with the Domain Name System (DNS) that was preventing progress on LTE capacity testing. DNS is a critical service enabling application used by the network for establishing customer connections to the correct gateway node and by end users as well to resolve the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of a target website when surfing the Web with their mobile devices. This problem with DNS was resulting in delays to the service provider’s testing schedule.

The customer, a leading provider of wireless voice and data services with over 90 million mobile subscribers, was facing a situation where several of its customers were having a problem getting authorization to the 3G network. The operations team responsible for this part of the network was unable to identify the problem with their existing performance monitoring tools even though they could see the RADIUS requests being sent from the eHRPD network. The service provider was deploying an LTE network alongside their existing 3G CDMA2000 network, and as such, required connectivity between the technology domains to assure that their subscribers will have a seamless user experience as they move from the coverage area of one Radio Access Technology (RAT) to another.

The mobile network operator in Canada was facing a challenge in migrating from their existing CDMA2000 network to a UMTS/HSPA+ network. The transition was critical to meet the increasing demand for broadband mobile applications and to introduce a wide variety of GSM Smart Phone handsets, including the iPhone. The operator planned to run the two networks in parallel while completely migrating to the UMTS/HSPA+ network over the next few years. The challenge was to minimize disruption to existing customers while introducing new services and handsets. The operator also needed a solution to rapidly identify, isolate, and resolve network problems that were disrupting services delivered to their customers.

The major cable provider, with operations spanning over half of the United States, was rolling out a new WiFi hotspot service nationwide. They needed to assure the performance and availability of the service and provide meaningful data to understand usage patterns across 2000+ hub sites located across multiple strategic locations. Since all existing users would have access to the WiFi infrastructure as part of their service bundle, maintaining satisfaction levels through this additional service was an essential consideration to keeping existing users happy, building brand loyalty, and reducing customer churn.

Open Mobile, a mobile telecommunications network operator based in Puerto Rico, was seeking to enhance its network visibility to maintain and improve its customer experience. The company was facing challenges in troubleshooting problems with LTE signaling traffic, monitoring user plane traffic for service anomalies, overseeing DNS monitoring and call tracing for causal aberrations, and controlling upgrade tasks of their network elements including SPGW and MME. Despite having a well-established technological foundation, the company was using less comprehensive packet analysis and subscriber session trace runs, which were proprietary in function and not providing an end-to-end solution. The company needed a comprehensive end-to-end, performance-monitoring tool that provided data-rich operational intelligence to allow for proactive troubleshooting.

The Bosch Group, a global provider of technology and services, faced a challenge in managing its vast network across 40 locations in the Southwest region of Germany. The network was managed by seven managers from two different locations, who were overburdened with a variety of complex tools that made the network troubleshooting process cumbersome and tedious. The managers had to manually plug into each server or network portion to identify components and then manually correlate and analyze the information. The lack of a standardized solution also made collaboration difficult, as different managers used different tools to collect data, leading to debates on information from different sources. This negatively impacted regional collaboration and made it nearly impossible to share knowledge worldwide.

Pruitt Communications, a provider of telephony solutions, faced challenges in deploying VoIP and unified communications systems for various organizations. The first step in any new rollout is an assessment to verify the readiness of the network. However, Pruitt Communications was unable to cost-effectively conduct performance testing and had to outsource these assessments, resulting in a loss of service revenue. Additionally, the company was required to troubleshoot any problems that were uncovered during the initial testing. Once the network was ready for the VoIP deployment and any problems addressed, the Pruitt team began to implement the new system. However, troubleshooting problems as they arose was a time-consuming process as Pruitt engineers had to evaluate performance, identify misconfigured devices, and simulate the performance of the VoIP system.