Global Manufacturer Improves Visibility in Co-Lo, Cloud, and Virtual Environments With NETSCOUT

The company’s multi-continent business operations footprint includes multiple data center facilities in Europe, Asia, and America. As the pandemic arrived, strategic projects involving Data Center Transformation and MultiCloud Migration were well underway. In this timeframe, IT had to advance strategic project activities, while facing unprecedented remote business service delivery demands. On the strategic side, the IT team was beginning the process of transitioning business applications to the cloud, selecting Microsoft Azure as one of their solution providers. Select data center services were also being migrated to Equinix Co-located (Co-lo) facilities during this timeframe. Tactically, business operations success suddenly became reliant on performance of the company’s virtual private network (VPN). As IT prepared to advance on these strategic and tactical challenges, they quickly found their progress impacted by lack of visibility into an SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application hosted in the company data center environment, Microsoft Azure Cloud-based services and applications, Microsoft Skype for Business (Skype) unified communications (UC) voice and video services, Microsoft Office 365 business applications, Remote applications depending on reliable access to VPN services, Web traffic crucial to Web-based application performance. Existing monitoring toolsets were coming up short. That made it difficult to isolate issues and accurately assign IT ownership. In such scenarios, the Network teams often bear the brunt of finger-pointing, and that was the case here.

This global manufacturer is a market leader, with diverse brands, specialized products, and a distinct retail network that has made it both a Fortune 500 company and household name. Their forward-thinking corporate leadership team and information technology (IT) commitment enabled the company to quickly respond to COVID-19 challenges, thanks in part to previous year projects focused on improving remote working infrastructure and business resiliency. As a result, while their retail stores were temporarily closed, the company was able to successfully transition to an online sales model, then gradually and securely resume manufacturing operations in an initially limited capacity. As they focused on those business challenges and maintained the safety of both employees and clients, the company also committed to making financial contributions to support the well-being of customer communities, as well as establishing relief funds for their workers.