Client: National Banking Institution
Client Challenge
Like many commercial entities today, our client came to a point where it was facing multiple infrastructure management issues that were difficult to untangle and address. As the banking institution evolved from a mainframe to distributed environment, its enterprise management tools and methodologies could no longer provide the end-end service management that customers needed. In addition, incremental deployment of various solutions had resulted in de-centralized management data that was difficult to aggregate and analyze when resolving a problem. From the operator’s perspective, the volume of alerts being received in the bank’s NOC had grown dramatically (1,500-2,500 events per day according to one metric) and they were becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Customers were reporting problems over the phone because the NOC had no information to proactively address outages.
This situation was unacceptable. Not only were its high customer service standards in jeopardy, but billions of dollars in transactions may not be processed timely if an outage occurred within the network or within a specific application. This situation affected critical processes such as personal check routing and bank-to-bank financial transactions of every type. The banking institution launched the Network Management System improvement (NMSi) project to add additional network management capability and to upgrade existing software and operating systems.
IT Solution
Windward designed and deployed a major enterprise management system enhancement to provide the bank with a foundation for proactively managing their enterprise infrastructure. This system included a Manager of Managers to consolidate diverse and sometimes redundant network event streams from multiple geographic locations to provide the ability to monitor network faults end-to-end in real time from a single enhanced display. The enhancements also gave the bank the ability to actively monitor security and network devices through a web interface.
Windward’s first priority was to position its client to make informed management decisions about the NMS. Windward worked with the bank to define its NMS requirements and systems architecture. Windward then prepared a gap analysis to compare existing tools and solutions with the bank's requirements. This resulted in a best practices and requirements document for fault and performance management that established a roadmap to a comprehensive and proactive NMS providing measurable end-to-end fault and performance management services and ultimately added value to the bank’s customer base.
Guaranteed Result
Windward’s work solved critical operational problems and provided a foundation of enterprise management best practices for future enhancement. Managers and Operations staff could monitor the status of the network from a single display either from a management console or via the web. Windward’s solution also helped the bank achieve an operational objective of being able to localize a problem to a specific geographic or “Tiered area” to reduce the number of experts needed during a triage session for emergency troubleshooting. Finally, the bank was able to implement institutionalized performance quality measurements, or Key Performance Indicators, to provide a foundation for end to end, metric-based service management capability.