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Trusted With Trillions
Imagine your company has over a trillion dollars in assets under administration. More than 50,000 corporate, government, and not-for-profit entities have entrusted these funds to your firm. As one of the country’s largest retirement services and advisory companies, you serve plan participants with customized financial wellness planning, investment accounts, and sophisticated benefits management solutions that help them grow their wealth without sacrificing returns or market access.
But it’s not just about managing money—it’s about improving people’s lives in the long haul. Such high stakes are why financial services companies rely so much on technology for their operations. They need to be able to process payments and manage investment portfolios in real time so they can take advantage of opportunities without unnecessary risk.
That is why many financial services companies were early adopters of cloud-based technologies. And during the pandemic, these highly scalable networks, storage, and services proved critical for this ThousandEyes customer as they balanced the needs of their newly distributed workforce with the systems vital to their business continuity.
Your Financial Future, Technically Managed
“The pandemic presented a challenge and an opportunity as to how we could extend our visibility outside of our network,” said a senior IT leader at the financial services organization. “Not only to clouds, where we are hosting certain services or applications, but also to our end users.”
With so much changing around them, leaders at the firm had to meet the evolving demands of its newly distributed workforce and its customers. The company turned to a goal of optimizing hybrid work processes for improved customer experiences. And software played a significant role in that equation.
Customers, with support from a financial wellness advisor, use the firm’s software to manage their investments and benefits. The product lines offered by the financial firm have digitized tremendously in recent years as new technologies and platforms were introduced to support the business’s expanded front and back-end functions.
But it was not just the technology that changed with the pandemic: customer expectations did, too. Customers today expect to be able to do more with their money. They want quality digital experiences with all the simplicity and convenience it brings—and if your firm doesn’t provide those things, then your competitors will win them over by giving them what they need instead.
Half of the Problems Reported by End Users
To meet customer needs, this financial services company relies on many critical applications, including OnBase, a hosted document repository with many integrations with other applications. Salespeople, benefits administrators, and even machines use OnBase to manage data, documents, and processes and unite them with critical systems.
Dependable access to OnBase is critical for the firm to conduct business, make timely trades, and support benefit requests through its workforce. Unfortunately, when the company came to ThousandEyes, 50 percent of the problems within its environment were reported by end users, which IT leaders at the firm considered far too high. They wanted to be proactive and have the proper monitoring and alerting to detect issues before end users experienced a problem.
Establishing Clear Views Into the Cloud
“We came across ThousandEyes through conversations with a subsidiary we bought,” said the IT senior leader. “We were talking about this challenge on a call, and they said, ‘Well, we use this product called ThousandEyes.’”
Technologent, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, made the initial introduction of ThousandEyes to the subsidiary. The firm’s IT leader continues, “We configured tests, deployed agents where we needed to, and almost immediately, we started getting some real value out of ThousandEyes and visibility into parts of the world that we didn’t have before.”
The financial services company performed a proof-of-value by configuring some of its most important use cases, including monitoring SaaS (Software as a Service) like Microsoft Teams and hosted apps like OnBase. They’ve now deployed Enterprise Agents in AWS (Amazon Web Services) AMI (Amazon Machine Images) and S3 (Simple Storage Service) to monitor the virtual environments of associates working in Bangalore, India, and the Philippines. The company has also set up synthetic tests for critical applications used by its operations team, allowing it to monitor vital Internet ingress and egresses from user devices using ThousandEyes Endpoint Agents.
Data You Can Show, Without the Slowdown
The company has now been using ThousandEyes for several years and has seen a noticeable impact on its troubleshooting, collaboration, and planning. It’s been able to use synthetic tests for its critical applications and to monitor Internet service providers (ISPs), so they can better understand where latency is being introduced and communicate that with reliable, network-agnostic data.
“ThousandEyes has also given us the ability to say, ‘We’ve got extreme latency on these hops. How can we work with either a local ISP (Internet Service Provider) or with AWS, or is there some other type of optimization service that we can use?’”
The financial firm’s use of ThousandEyes’ visualizations and dashboards has also allowed it to track network performance over time and identify trends that may need attention.
“It’s nice having that data to show our security team, network team, virtualization team, cloud team, or service provider,” said the senior IT leader. “What it’s done is decrease our mean time to repair.”
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