As with many industries, applications in the Financial Services sector are often customer facing and generate revenue. However, these organizations can face unique challenges in delivering 24/7, mission critical availability through their underlying IT infrastructure. Enterprise financial services organizations are typically decentralized, both geographically and organizationally, and they must deal with a huge spectrum of technologies from legacy mainframes to hybrid cloud computing deployments. With tremendous pressure to meet the highest service levels, most are struggling to succeed with disparate sets of legacy monitoring tools they have accumulated over the years.
Compounding the problem for this vertical is the issue of scale. These IT organizations are some of the largest, most complex enterprise data centers in the world (many of our financial services customers have hundreds of business units, each with unique applications and services being delivered), and the data sets that they must manage are growing exponentially. This is forcing the IT Operations teams within these companies to search for monitoring and management tools with a future-ready design and technology stack that is ‘big data’ capable.
As if all of those challenges weren’t daunting enough, financial services companies must also keep information security as a foremost priority. Due to the ever-changing landscape of attacks, vulnerabilities and compliance requirements, financial services require IT infrastructure that is both adaptable, as well as highly customizable. Rapid integration of new hardware and applications is the norm.
It is for all of these reasons, that Zenoss Service Dynamics has become the system of choice for a growing number of financial institutions. Zenoss Service Dynamics was designed from the ground up to help address today’s complex IT environments, enabling a single platform from which to monitor physical, virtual, and cloud based infrastructures, at scale, and with a high degree of automation. Utilizing next-generation, open source technologies like Docker containers, in conjunction with a big data (Open TSDB on Hadoop) backbone, ZSD is a truly open and extensible platform that makes it both flexible and future-proof to fit the needs of today’s hybrid IT environments.
As an example, one of our largest financial services customers was able to decommission twelve monitoring tools – including two expensive legacy frameworks – after implementing Zenoss to monitor 15,000 devices across two decentralized data centers. Using just the saving from the elimination of maintenance costs, they were able to fund five additional team members. With these added resources in place, as well as centralized event management and cross-team transparency of monitoring data, they were able to improve their Mean Time To Response (MTTR) by roughly 85%.
Given that the adoption of new amenities like mobile pay, photo check cashing, and a host of other “on-the-go” services continue to rise, it’s clear that complexity for the financial services sector will only increase. Thankfully, those organizations with Zenoss Service Dynamics in place will be ready to adapt. So, to steal a line from Capital One’s favorite pitchman Samuel Jackson: “What’s in your data center?”
