Industry: Financial Services

Company: The financing arm of a major US automobile manufacturer

Challenge: Modernizing data center monitoring to accelerate operations

Solution: Deploying 100G joint network visibility and monitoring solutions from Keysight, ExtraHop, Corelight, and other preferred partners

Overview

No sector places a higher premium on speed than the automobile industry, and that includes managing the data used to originate and maintain loans. To meet modern expectations for speed and scale, the financial services arm of one leading US automaker chose to evolve its data center networks to 100G capacities with visibility and monitoring solutions from Keysight, ExtraHop, and Corelight.

The Challenge: Streamlining Modernization

The steady growth of online loan origination and cybersecurity threats requires finance companies to monitor performance and respond to threats at speed and scale. Adopting AI will raise the stakes for satisfaction and efficiency gains even higher.

This US financial services company’s IT and security leaders moved to get ahead of the curve by investing in a sweeping modernization of three prominent Texas data centers. The upgrade of 10G and 40G networks to high capacity 100G architectures includes deploying newer, more advanced performance and security monitoring solutions from a handful of valued incumbent partners.

The initial phase of the project featured the latest offerings from long-term Keysight technology alliance partners such as ExtraHop and Corelight. The internal team also engaged Worldwide Technology to help design and pull together various components of the solution quickly and manage the deployment end-to-end.

Having been a satisfied Keysight customer for more than a decade, the company saw no need to reevaluate its choice of network visibility platforms. Instead they doubled down on Keysight, opting to replace and migrate to newer, more advanced network packet brokers (NPBs).

The goal of this enhanced network visibility? To build an AI-scale platform for growth that would feed actionable data to monitoring tools cost-efficiently.

The Solution: Modern Visibility that Optimizes Data for Analysis

Upgrades to the provider’s data center monitoring infrastructure included deploying ExtraHop’s Reveal(X) solutions and the latest offerings from Corelight to optimize network and security operations. The newly enhanced Keysight visibility platform equips these and other monitoring tools to improve threat detection, incident triage, and response while lowering costs.

Investments in modern visibility include:

• 5 Keysight Vision Edge 50 appliances to aggregate network traffic for processing
• 2 high-capacity Vision Edge 400 packet brokers performing real-time filtering and deduplication
• Keysight’s PacketStack and NetStack software modules providing advanced processing features

Critical benefits of the newly integrated visibility and monitoring solutions include:

• Cost-effective aggregation of traffic from multiple links for high-speed processing prior to analysis
• Deduplication to remove redundant packets and send only clean, analysis-ready data to monitoring tools
• Industry-best ease of use with Keysight’s widely acclaimed GUI saving analysts time and effort
• A unified management experience that equips the customer team to configure and operate all visibility appliances within a single console while lowering training requirements and the likelihood of error   

The financial services company’s IT and security leaders also valued the close collaboration between Worldwide Technology, Corelight, ExtraHop, Keysight and other partners as the first phase of the multi-year rollout got underway.

What’s Next?

Putting a flexible, AI-enabled visibility platform in place establishes a foundation for the customer to expand its modernization effort to additional data centers quickly. The capacity, scale, and support delivered by Keysight and its partners positions the firm to add and leverage new AI-driven monitoring tools and protect data from the next wave of cyber threats.