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Regaining IT Control of the Client Edge With NETSCOUT
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Remote Collaboration
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
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.
About The Customer
The energy company employs more than 10,000 service specialists supporting delivery and storage solutions for commercial and individual customers across a multi-country service region. Like many in the energy industry sector, this company continues to garner favorable media coverage for innovations related to lower-carbon and biofuel solutions, as well as renewable power plants. The company’s technology infrastructure for assuring high-quality utility service delivery to millions of their customers depended on a multi-tier, multi-vendor environment that included in-house information technology (IT) specialists tasked with overall infrastructure operations oversight, Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) resources contracted to manage wide area network (WAN) services and data center performance on the company’s behalf, Microsoft Azure Cloud (Azure) cloud services running in international Microsoft service locations, and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud solution.
The Solution
The IT oversight team gained the client edge visibility they required by deploying the NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE infrastructure monitoring solution with nPoint sensors. They made this selection following critical review of several approaches, with the NETSCOUT solution differentiated by nGeniusPULSE and nPoints providing extensive flexibility to configure business-relevant and network health-related continuous synthetic testing to assess end-user experience in their remote office environments. Using a “first things, first” approach, the IT team immediately took advantage nPoint synthetic testing into cloud-based MS Office 365 and Teams performance to generate quality of user experience assessments. IT’s assessment showed the issues that remote users were raising in Help Desk tickets were in fact related to Office 365 and Teams performance degradations that were suspected as being related to root cause. This evidence also show that these services were not being delivered in compliance with Microsoft SLAs, which equipped IT with the real-world assessments required to quantify the need for vendor improvements.
Operational Impact
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