Barclays is one the world's largest financial institutions and launched their first Technology Open Innovation Challenge in London in 2013. Their second event was here in Silicon Valley, where around 200 of the Bay Area’s most innovative startups were nominated, from which 70 were short-listed to present to the Barclays Technology Executive Committee.
ThousandEyes was one of companies invited to participate. We were told that sessions were going to be dynamic and interactive with plenty of time for questions – digging into technical details of the technology and what problems it solves. And even though we’d been allotted the end-of-day slot, with UK members of the audience technically ‘burning the midnight oil’, we were not disappointed.
Networks are More Complex than Ever
The Executive Committee members in the room were made up of key technology and operations leaders, including global infrastructure, IT, customer support and enterprise architecture. Mohit Lad, our CEO, shared a few thoughts on the evolution of networks ‘without boundaries’ and the impact of ever increasing complexity impacting each of the roles sitting in the room. We then dived into the ThousandEyes product – not to go through its compelling features – but to dissect real-world issues from the past few days and weeks.
From Correlation to Causation
We showed how correlating various layers, from application experience to underlying network infrastructure, provides an immediate understanding of the source of critical performance issues. Important for any organization with a large, distributed IT environment, as well as for online operations on the ecommerce side, such as mobile banking.
Financial Services and Security Attacks
Even though ThousandEyes was built to solve network problems, we showed its value in responding to security attacks that impact infrastructure, such as DDoS, DNS hijacking and BGP hijacking. We showed how IT teams can use ThousandEyes to immediately focus on the areas that need attention most by immediately detecting the impact on the infrastructure and which portions were more (or less) impacted. We showed how to understand if the mitigation strategy is actually working as expected and to get fine-grained information on which aspects/areas of the infrastructure, both inside and outside the environment, need more attention.
Mohit explained that the fact these use cases are even possible, is that ThousandEyes provides visibility into a core component of our lives – the network, and the reason its useful for so many different scenarios, including security, is because of the increasing reliance on the network.
Recognition of Value
These were just some of the highlights – showing effective ways to overcome real world issues caused by today’s more complex network infrastructures. And how organizations, such as those in financial services use ThousandEyes to respond to outages, issues and attacks. The session was collaborative and the conversations productive. Following the day-long event, ThousandEyes was announced as a winner of the Network/Infrastructure category at the CIO Summit Reception.
Start Diagnosing Your Networks
The thing is, most people are well aware of the importance of applications in the enterprise, but assume the network is always and reliably there … until it’s not. The kicker is that networks are more complex than ever before. For example, application delivery can span SaaS providers, the Internet, your datacenter(s) and your customers’ endpoint device – and that’s the simple version.
If you or your teams are spending far too much time responding to network issues, you can start monitoring your networks right away with a free trial of ThousandEyes.