The Credit Union was experiencing growth in business operations and needed to review their existing data center, network, and application monitoring investments. They concluded that the Network Security and the Network Operations team did not have the required visibility into all their traffic in all locations. Their requirements include visibility into their many network protocols and business applications, performance analysis of customer facing applications, trending of overall traffic utilization, utilization by application, alongside network bandwidth and capacity. They needed a solution that would support their operations today, as well as in the future, as they implemented their digital transformation strategies for the credit union. They needed to deploy a monitoring solution that had visibility from their core network at the new Data Center location to the edge where customer transactions take place.

The financial institution was facing serious issues with their current DDoS protection vendor. The vendor provided a hybrid solution with an on-premise component as well as a cloud component. However, the system was failing due to service-related outages caused by software updates by the vendor. The organization was looking to replace their current system with an always-on cloud solution only. They believed that they did not require anything on premise as they had before when employing an always-on cloud solution. However, NETSCOUT Representatives made the case that always-on typically means always monitoring but not always mitigating. The reason for this is that pushing all of the network traffic to a cloud scrubbing center and then returning it the network could result in severe system latency.

The school district was faced with the challenge of assuring a high-quality learning experience for students and faculty during a time of increased remote learning and as schools rebalance to on-campus instruction. They needed to provide troubleshooting visibility throughout the network infrastructure with excellent Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). The tremendous growth in network traffic on these systems created monitoring challenges. Particularly challenging was performance and bandwidth availability in the final mile to students’ homes and the Quality of Service (QoS) labels used for traffic prioritization for remote learning content within their large datacenters, and across the internet to their students’ homes. One primary goal of this project was to implement and monitor WAN services between data centers, schools and students to ensure sufficient bandwidth was available and to verify that QoS assignments were delivering applications in the correct priority class.

The financial institution was battling Application-Layer and TCP-Flood-DDoS attacks that their service provider’s always-on cloud solution could not identify and manage effectively. They embarked on a traffic analysis project to understand the malicious traffic traversing their network. They initially employed an always-on cloud solution provided through a service provider. The solution was sufficient for identifying and mitigating volumetric DDoS attacks, but it struggled with other DDoS attack vectors. The cloud solution was typically designed and configured to trigger mitigation on traffic volume spikes, which meant it had trouble identifying low and slow Layer 7 application attacks and attacks targeting the TCP Tables within stateful devices.

The company was facing challenges in integrating Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex services to enhance employee productivity and performance quality. They were experiencing issues such as poor quality of voice and video transmissions in incoming streams, two-second latency on external calls, and 'choppy frames' during video exchanges in the integrated Microsoft/Cisco environment. The company was unable to monitor and analyze the traffic coming into the Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams services from the internet due to visibility gaps into each vendor’s cloud environments. This led to finger-pointing across the IT Operations divide regarding the root cause of these issues.

The school district faced challenges in ensuring a high-quality educational experience for remote students and teachers due to connectivity and bandwidth issues. The shift to 100% remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated upgrades to the district’s infrastructure and monitoring capabilities. The district had already implemented Infinite Campus as its Student Information System (SIS) but now needed to make that suite of applications and information accessible to teachers who chose to work remotely. In addition, the primary platform for remote learning was Webex and the ability to monitor this critical application’s performance and troubleshoot any issues needed to be greatly enhanced. The entire network infrastructure needed to be seen – from client edge, to network edge, to data center / cloud service edges, to both identify the location of any bottle necks, and to quickly determine if network or application, or even security issues, are at the bottom of any inadequate support for learning or administrative applications. Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) needed to be as short as possible.

The company's Security Operations (SecOps) team was facing challenges in securing the network perimeter. The process was largely manual, involving maintaining a rolling list of IP addresses (i.e., blacklist) at the firewall level. Any new IP address potentially viewed as a rogue actor was manually added to the “bottom of the list” by a SecOps resource. This approach was proving to be inefficient due to the vast size of the IP address list, the manual efforts associated with its maintenance, and questions regarding both accuracy and currency. With the company’s network and data center operations growth and the resultant expansion of their threat landscape, SecOps was in need of a next-generation perimeter security solution that would better safeguard business and complement what the nGeniusONE and smart visibility solution was already providing to cross-IT resources.

The public utility company needed monitoring visibility to their 4G LTE infrastructure and turned to NETSCOUT for their nGeniusONE and nGenius Session Analysis toolsets to help them monitor two data centers in major cities in North America. They needed a way to separate functions within the power infrastructure to monitor each individual process to be able to identify the problems and to quickly resolve them. The 4G LTE 3GPP standards provide an elegant solution by which this public utility provider utilizes separate key power infrastructure elements by setting up unique APNs per group.

The company had enhanced operations efficiencies through numerous ongoing digital technology initiatives. In one such project, the company’s operations team improved the performance of their controller environment by using the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to identify operational changes (e.g., pressure drops) to alert whether there was a possible transport network leak. The company also used the SCADA system to monitor sump levels, vapor concentrations, pump-seal failures, and equipment vibration leaks. In the context of the company’s IT Operations, SCADA was monitored along the network peripheral, with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) remotely installed across the delivery network communicating operational status to the SCADA database. Over time, NetOps monitoring of company’s SCADA environment showed they were experiencing electrical brownouts (e.g., power blips) on their wide area network (WAN) satellite links. As these brownouts occurred, the PLCs would initiate health check requests every 10 seconds. While the satellite links did not go down during this time, the SCADA system stopped running on the affected WAN links, which placed controller environment operations at risk. For every five-minute interval, an estimated 600 network transport transactions would be impacted when SCADA was not operating.

The holdings company and banking institution, while benefiting from centralized IT efficiencies, have separate network infrastructures, business services, and capital expenditure (CapEx) processes. This occasionally prompts sequential, rather than concurrent, adoption of common vendor technology platforms. The challenges for work-from-home (WFH) employees included access to, and reliable performance of Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for secure business application use, Oracle services, and VoIP and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) service quality. These issues remained largely unresolved, despite in-place vendor troubleshooting toolsets in the holdings company environment. This frustrated both employees and the IT resources tasked with troubleshooting and mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) functions without single-pane visibility into how these solutions operated in home office environments.

The healthcare organization was a long-time user of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to help maintain the quality, availability, and reliability of their clinical applications and services, including Cerner electronic medical records and their Telemedicine platform. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented them with several additional network and application assurance challenges. Patients with non-COVID-19- related healthcare afflictions that needed to be addressed increased use of their cloud-based Telemedicine services. In fact, daily use of this telemedicine app grew more than tenfold initially and only continued to expand in providing virtual appointments and follow-ups for patients. Staff was equally enthusiastic over the benefits of its use and expectations for long-term benefits in healthcare delivery. From an IT perspective, this created an increase in traffic across the corporate environment and over their Internet Service (ISP) links and needed to be managed to ensure the quality of each telemedicine session. Further, in a patient survey, low scores and comments were reported for the Telemedicine service based on poor quality calls, background noise, jitter, and dropped calls that had made sessions unproductive, inefficient, and frustrating for patients, and doctors alike.

The healthcare organization was a long-time user of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to help maintain the quality, availability, and reliability of their clinical applications and services, including Cerner electronic medical records and their Telemedicine platform. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented them with several additional network and application assurance challenges. Patients with non-COVID-19- related healthcare afflictions that needed to be addressed increased use of their cloud-based Telemedicine services. In fact, daily use of this telemedicine app grew more than tenfold initially and only continued to expand in providing virtual appointments and follow-ups for patients. Staff was equally enthusiastic over the benefits of its use and expectations for long-term benefits in healthcare delivery. From an IT perspective, this created an increase in traffic across the corporate environment and over their Internet Service (ISP) links and needed to be managed to ensure the quality of each telemedicine session. Further, in a patient survey, low scores and comments were reported for the Telemedicine service based on poor quality calls, background noise, jitter, and dropped calls that had made sessions unproductive, inefficient, and frustrating for patients, and doctors alike.

The law firm depends on their Document Management Service (DMS) for all their client information, case files, client briefs, court filings, etc. It is in constant use, and responsiveness is expected when researching employment or regulatory requirements maintained by their clients, discussing strategies, processing filings, and making background inquiries, recording updates, and/or doing research. Attorneys and staff depend on seamless, unencumbered access to the DMS to do their jobs and service their clients. Delays and outages impact their ability to work with clients, and by extension, log billable hours. The fact is, when the DMS has problems, it affects the firm’s bottom line – revenue. The IT team at the law firm also was concerned about reports of slowness with accessing information in the data center from remote locations over their virtual desktop interface (VDI) application, Citrix. This had similar implications to issues with DMS, in that it would prevent remote staff and lawyers from accessing their client information. Their ability to maintain quality communications, regardless of the platform in use - voice or video conferencing - was also a high priority for the IT staff. With staff and clients all working from home globally, communications became a strategic priority to business continuity.

The Asian financial services leader was facing several challenges associated with ongoing data center operations and digital transformations. The CIO was concerned about improving visibility, security, and real-time monitoring of Internet and Mobile eBanking applications that were increasingly used by millions of customers for their transactions. The bank was also planning to migrate certain on-premises data center operations and application workloads to a private cloud environment. The CIO wanted to maximize metadata-based analytics to improve Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) productivity and collaboration. The existing vendor tools for network performance monitoring and packet broker functionality were neither integrated, nor equipped to support the CIO’s nearterm initiatives.

The manufacturer was facing performance issues with their plant floor performance management service (PFS) application, which is crucial for specifying feature options for the equipment, tracking the building and assembly processes, performing quality checks at the end of production, and noting repairs if they were required. The IT staff had visibility to evaluate and troubleshoot issues with this application in the data centers. However, once it hit the carrier’s MPLS network, there was a gap in visibility into application performance in the production plants that complicated IT’s ability to assure quality delivery was maintained throughout the entire communications cycle. As issues with this application were increasing in some of the plants, it became a priority for IT to gain visibility to investigate and resolve the problems before production schedules were further impacted.

The customer, an intergovernmental organization supporting many countries, was encountering DDoS Attack traffic, threatening their capability to keep services running to their data centers. They maintain separate and distinct data centers throughout the globe, each with diverse needs. Initially, they had employed several protection strategies including services offered by their ISP and a cloud solution. This approach was somewhat successful, but some attack traffic was still getting through and becoming a nuisance. They approached NETSCOUT to explore a hybrid approach, combining a cloud solution to watch for volumetric attacks and on-premise devices to identify DDoS traffic designed to evade volumetric attack mitigation.

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.

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.

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 Western European organization, which consults on network infrastructure with insurance, government, and financial institutions, was experiencing accelerated growth and increased regulations around banking customers. This led to the realization that they needed to upgrade their DDoS protection immediately. Despite having an always-on cloud solution for DDoS protection, the organization was still experiencing some DDoS activity that seemed to bypass the cloud solution. The organization was initially leaning towards an always-on cloud solution, but the NETSCOUT team presented them with a report from the Omnis Threat Horizon Kiosk which showed several attacks on their datacenters that regularly bypass always-on cloud solutions.

The private university, with campuses spread all over the world, was already undergoing a project to renew their infrastructure and their ability to monitor the network and foundation for applications at their central data center and extending to half-a-dozen other data centers when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The pandemic resulted in not only their students and faculty working from home, but also their IT staff, making remote monitoring more important than ever. The university's inter-site and intra-site traffic runs on DMVPN tunnels over the public Internet, which were slowing between sites. They had problems determining the exact cause of slowness when their application servers were accessed across data centers. Finally, their Unified Communications & Collaboration installation was having call setup and teardown, and quality problems.

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 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 medical center’s IT team was responsible for an increasing number of complex, patient impacting applications and systems used for electronic health records (EHR); including radiology and medical imaging, Health Layer 7 (HL7) interoperability, centralized blood management, oncology treatment, telehealth, storage management, and patient identity management. Their challenge was to provide pervasive visibility into the organization’s clinical applications for troubleshooting, application service assurance, and problem identification before they became disruptions. They were also dealing with existing issues with their Nuance PowerScribe, a voice-based application offering voice-to-text support for radiology reporting. Issues with this service were intermittent and frustrating to users and IT. Lacking visibility into unified communications (UC) technology and/or service dependencies, the IT team could not pinpoint root cause. From a networking perspective, the IT team needed visibility to troubleshoot and deliver service assurance for users connecting through their virtual private network (VPN) and VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. COVID-19 pandemic drove dramatic increases in use of telehealth services, collaboration tools (such as Zoom), and work-from-home for employees. This made reducing mean time (MTTR) to resolution with VPN and VDI issues that much more critical for the IT team. Gaining visibility into the organizations high-speed network as well as their VMware ESX environment was also essential.

The network engineering and operations team at this hospital network has one goal in mind - swift, safe, secure, and efficient delivery of patient care services. This is a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week operation. There is no “off” when it comes to patient care. The IT organization had a lot on its plate with a new data center coming online and moving critical patient-impacting services over to the new environment. With their decision to deploy the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution for proactive network and application performance management, the network director and engineering senior manager needed to implement the solution quickly to ensure before, during, and after application migrations to the new data center were operating efficiently. If issues developed with these migrations and cutovers, they were depending on information provided from the nGeniusONE solution to quickly pinpoint the problem and restore quality service to the hospital staff.

The bank was facing a challenge as their existing network management tool was nearing the end of its useful life. They needed a new service assurance solution that could provide visibility into banking and trading services in their digitally transforming environment. The bank's requirements included application analysis for critical back-office services, infrastructure visibility for end-to-end visibility between private data centers, AWS cloud, and their distributed bank branches, simultaneous support in single management application for analysis of network packet traffic and NetFlow data, and performance management use cases and capabilities to address troubleshooting, early warning of emerging issues, utilization trending, capacity planning, end-user experience analysis, in a single analysis platform.

The regional financial services leader was facing challenges in assuring retail banking at thousands of regional locations. The bank's IT Operations team had specific requirements for their network performance monitoring solution. They wanted enhanced service edge visibility, user-friendly operations, and easy access to packet-based analysis. They needed to improve views into business service performance at regional bank locations and better visualization into data center operations hosted by their banking partner. They also wanted to improve visualization into the performance being delivered by two regional service providers (SPs) on behalf of the bank. The IT Operations team had goals for proactive monitoring and reduced finger-pointing that related to their expectations for better visualization into these respective SP environments.

The agency was facing several challenges. Firstly, the increased reliance on Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings created IT voice and video monitoring challenges. The network traffic spikes prompted needs for added data center visualization and forensic packet storage. The agency was also interested in introducing 100GB speeds in certain network segments, and there was an associated IT Operations need for data sources offering processing and packet collection support in those environments. Another overarching concern was the agency had nearly completed performance management tool consolidation to standardize on NETSCOUT, but there were still champions of a displaced vendor’s solution, particularly among the Network Architecture team.

The hospital network had seen a significant increase in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices over recent years. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospital faced numerous cybersecurity threats, including risks to their IoT devices that needed to be protected. The hospital's Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) teams needed to work together to reduce these threats and investigate potential incidents of compromise, particularly with their extensive cache of distributed IoT devices. The hospital had made the strategic decision to standardize on networked packet traffic as the best source for data intelligence and selected a solution to secure their IoT devices that leverages packet data. However, they needed ways to share that data between both the IoT security tool and their NETSCOUT Service Assurance solution.

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.