Government Agency Resolves VPN Performance Issues With NETSCOUT Visibility
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform
- InfiniStreamNG appliances
Tech Stack
- VPN
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The customer is a government agency whose information technology (IT) team provides critical services, including deploying network infrastructure and essential application resources for use by employees located throughout the United States. While many of the agency’s employees are centralized, others are frequent travelers, connecting to the data center from airports, remote sites, and even home offices. There are also several dozen branch offices that depend on resources provided by this IT group. As much of this agency’s work can be unpredictable, so too are the hours they work, necessitating this exceptional IT staff to maintain a strategic 24 x 7 operation.
The Challenge
The government agency was experiencing an increase in remote users, which corresponded to increased traffic volumes accessing agency resources in the data center. This was causing network traffic and bandwidth issues in key enterprise areas tied to remote users accessing applications. These changes in volume were presenting significant performance and availability challenges for the IT staff. The agency was also seeing employees, connected to the enterprise network over the VPN, streaming music, TV, and movie services like Netflix, Comcast, and YouTube, which were consuming a large amount of the bandwidth.
The Solution
The agency's IT staff, in concert with their local NETSCOUT engineers, configured real-time nGeniusONE Service Dashboards and Grid views related to the monitored VPN services to understand all the characteristics of the employee VPN traffic and the consumption of network resources. The goal was to evaluate the different traffic flows and make decisions on how targeted adjustments in specific activity could ensure performance of critical application flows. The IT staff decided to make a configuration change to deploy split tunneling for their VPN environment. This would permit the agency’s employees to connect to the essential business applications and services when they were traveling, accessing remotely, or working from home via the secure VPN. For other activity like Web surfing and streaming services, the traffic would be routed directly over the internet, without consuming large amounts of bandwidth at the agency’s VPN.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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