NETSCOUT > Case Studies > Smart Edge Visibility Into AWS Cloud Assures Global Employee Productivity Over VPN

Smart Edge Visibility Into AWS Cloud Assures Global Employee Productivity Over VPN

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
InfiniStreamNG® and vSTREAM® smart visibility appliances
Virtual nGenius® Flow Collectors
nGenius®PULSE with nPoint sensors
NETSCOUT® Premium Services Engineering

Tech Stack

AWS Cloud
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Palo Alto Network (PAN) firewall services

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Employee Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud

Applicable Industries

Equipment & Machinery

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Remote Asset Management
Remote Collaboration

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

This U.S. company manufactures specialized equipment and applications used by businesses across numerous industry verticals. Their workforce is segmented into division-specific practice areas, which has enabled the company to expand their service delivery reach to more than 100 countries. Some 10,000 global employees are focused on developing and supporting products used by 250,000 clients. In the last decade, information technology operations (IT Operations) teams have relied on NETSCOUT technology and contracted Premium Services Engineering (PSE) to assure business continuity and a high-quality end-user experience. During that time, PSE resources have helped IT Operations to maximize the efficiencies offered by their NETSCOUT investments, including Service Assurance analytics (i.e., nGeniusONE, nGeniusPULSE, and nGenius for Flows) and Smart Edge visibility (i.e., InfiniStreamNG, vSTREAM, nGenius NetFlow Collector, nGenius Packet Flow Switch, and nGeniusPULSE nPoint hardware and virtual sensors) solutions.

The Challenge

The pandemic’s arrival marked the start of increased complexity in the company’s client, network, data center, and cloud service edge environments. Shortly after COVID-19’s emergence and the company’s expansion of virtual private network (VPN) services to support thousands of employees moving to work-from-home (WFH) environments, IT Operations conferred with their NETSCOUT PSE resources about maximizing the use of nGeniusONE and nGeniusPULSE to better inform their investigation and resolution decisionmaking. That effort quickly resulted in IT Operations using VPN split-tunneling to ease WFH users’ access to UC&C services directly over the Internet. Longer-term, IT Operations’ remediation approach involved establishing nearly 20 VPN access points and Palo Alto Network (PAN) f irewall services in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud resources. That approach seemed to address their remote network bandwidth issues quickly and securely, but it also revealed a gap in how well IT Operations could visualize VPN and firewall services were performing in AWS. Performance over these network service edges in the AWS environment was critical to WFH employees’ success. With only NetFlow and MIB2 data available to them, IT Operations struggled to make sense of the discrepancies between the disparate, siloed data sources. Further, IT Operations was losing visibility into performance at one remote site due to blind spots in the traffic traversing from their wide area network (WAN) into AWS.

The Solution

IT Operations orchestrated a coordinated approach to closing blind spots by collaborating with their PSE resources to map out an AWS Cloud Visibility design that enabled the company to refactor some earlier-deployed NETSCOUT investments and quickly add only as-needed data sources to deliver the end-through-end visibility that had been lacking. In improving visibility in AWS, the design plan involved: Architecting vSTREAM virtual appliances to monitor VPN and PAN Firewall services operating in the cloud. Refactoring nGenius Flow Collectors into Virtual Flow Collectors for deployment in the cloud. Deploying Remote ISNG appliance technology at the regional facility where IT Operations experienced blind spots into the traffic traversing from their WAN into AWS. Migrating select nGeniusONE Server instances to AWS cloud, so IT Operations could leverage nGeniusONE Service Dashboard and Service Monitor views based on NETSCOUT Smart Data generated in real-time from vSTREAM and nGenius Collector data sources to refine their AWS monitoring capabilities.

Operational Impact

High-quality end-user experience in WFH and remote offices aids employee productivity
End-through-end visibility assures reliable business delivery across all service edges
The common denominator associated with these issues was service edge visibility limitations, and the challenge involved quickly closing those blind spots to return business service reliability to employees – and, by extension, the thousands of customers and millions of users reliant on this company’s biomedical solutions.
When considered outside the walls of the business, the company’s reliable performance and employee productivity during this period have enhanced public perception, especially among those clients relying on uninterrupted delivery of essential biomedical products and services.