Case Studies: Financial Services
Financial Services
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Situation
Our client, a large U.S. Insurance Company, was in the midst of a new IP telephony implementation in its remote offices, and was faced with several challenges:
- They needed access to the system infrastructure at every site, but could not afford to have a dedicated tech/system administrator at each site;
- The client needed quick problem resolution and remediation in the event of a system outage at a remote location, and wanted to ensure that they didn't extend the duration of any outage because the internal system (NOC and VoIP) administrators did not have access;
- Too many people had access to the data centers. This crowding led to people getting in the way of their co-workers, which in turn contributed to physical errors in the facilities. The client wanted to virtualize these data centers for most users under normal operating conditions, reserving physical access for a select few authorized individuals, and only in exceptional circumstances.
- They needed secure access for serial and power equipment in addition to telephony.
Our Challenge
IT administrators were expected to maintain high service levels by avoiding service outages or resolving them very quickly, but they realized that it would be impractical and cost-prohibitive to have a resident administrator at every remote office. There was no acceptable integrated secure access and management solution available in the IP telephony marketplace. Xceedium was therefore tasked with ensuring that centrally-located system administrators and technical support personnel had immediate and complete access to key components of the IP telephony infrastructure at every remote location for maintenance and remediation in the event of a service outage. In addition to servers, these admins would be responsible for managing the network elements (Cisco switches) and security elements (firewalls, VPNs) supporting IP telephony.
The Xceedium Solution
Initially, Xceedium deployed the GateKeepers to provide a secure remote access solution for this client in multiple data centers and regional offices that support IP telephony. Once the client began to realize significant business benefits from using Xceedium GateKeeper to help manage their IP telephony infrastructure, they expressed interest in using Xceedium's secure remote access solution for their NOC and branch office network infrastructure services as well.As of today, Xceedium has deployed a total of twenty-one GateKeepers in twelve different locations worldwide – data centers, regional operating centers and a handful of critical branch offices – to support most business units for this client, and is part of their enterprise blueprint for secure remote access and management of the NOC and telephony environments. The client has relied on Xceedium to provide secure remote access to critical infrastructure for more than five years.
Business Benefits
As a result of implementing Xceedium's secure remote access solution, this client:
- Increased the efficiency of key staff in the event of an outage by providing centralized experts with immediate, reliable, granular-level, remote access control for all levels and critical components in the IT infrastructure – from managing power to controlling the server racks;
- Minimized the duration and cost of service outages, in terms of both lost revenue opportunities and staff remediation time and expense;
- Improved overall staff productivity, eliminating the need for on-site technical support staff by establishing reliable, secure remote management capability for the IP telephony, NOC and branch office network infrastructures with very low administrative overhead;
- Ensured secure access to the critical IT infrastructure for both in-band and out-of-band methods, including complete control over the command line (CLI); and
- Improved audit controls by initiating tracking and reporting of all activities and events.