This is why the leading global financial organizations leverage the Alluvio Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) platform—a comprehensive solution designed to address the unique challenges they face while maintaining their competitive advantages. With Alluvio Aternity, companies can gain insights into customer journeys, both converting and non-converting, and track user experience at every step of their journey, identifying and optimizing the highest-converting paths and eliminating any roadblocks. In addition, the platform can monitor the employee experience for critical business applications used to support customers, reducing friction during customer journeys due to broken links and other issues.

Enhancing customer experience

At the heart of every financial institution’s success lies exceptional customer experience.  Alluvio Aternity DEM helps global financial services companies monitor and optimize the performance of their digital services, ensuring seamless and satisfying experiences for customers. With Alluvio Aternity’s advanced analytics and insights, financial institutions can proactively identify and resolve performance issues, thereby minimizing customer frustration and maximizing satisfaction.

One of these ways is with Aternity’s User Journey Intelligence (UJI) functionality. With UJI, Alluvio Aternity leverages advanced Real User Monitoring (RUM) technology to track user journeys and analyze web page load time, providing insights into top-line business metrics such as revenue, customer engagement, and customer abandonment. The platform also offers Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) for proactive issue identification. This is unique to Alluvio Aternity, where financial services companies can gain a competitive edge over pure-play DEM vendors lacking RUM, STM, or both.

Boosting employee productivity & accelerating digital transformation

In addition to improving customer experience, Alluvio Aternity DEM also enhances employee productivity by providing insights into the performance of internal applications and systems. By identifying bottlenecks and performance issues, Alluvio Aternity allows financial institutions to optimize their internal processes and workflows, resulting in increased efficiency and reduced operational costs.

As the global financial services industry continues to evolve, organizations must be agile and adaptable to stay ahead of the curve.  Alluvio Aternity DEM has supported financial institutions in their digital transformation journey by providing the tools and insights needed to optimize and innovate their digital services. With Alluvio Aternity, financial institutions across the globe have confidently embraced new technologies and delivered exceptional digital experiences to both customers and employees.

When Swiss Re, a leading provider of insurance, reinsurance and other forms of insurance-based risk solutions, underwent their digital transformation strategy they aimed to simplify collaboration among global teams and between Swiss Re and its external partners and customers. However, their existing device performance monitoring tool couldn’t provide a comprehensive understanding of their workforce’s experience, making it hard to interpret and scale. With Alluvio Aternity, Swiss Re was able to remotely, proactively, and non-invasively measure actual end-user experience, improving visibility and efficiency gains.

“What we particularly liked with Alluvio Aternity was the ease in which we could analyze and correlate data. Alluvio Aternity makes this insight easily available to a broader audience in a format that is scalable and sharable with our internal stakeholders,” said Joost Smit, Digital Workplace Solution Architect and Engineer at Swiss Re.

Looking ahead

These are just a couple of examples of how the Alluvio Aternity Digital Experience Management platform is the ideal solution for global financial services companies looking to navigate the complexities of today’s digital landscape. By providing real-time insights into application performance, end-user experience, and overall system health, Alluvio Aternity DEM empowers financial institutions to deliver exceptional digital experiences, maintain regulatory compliance, and drive business growth.

To learn more about how Alluvio Aternity is helping financial services companies stay competitive in while addressing today’s challenges, watch our webinar on “How IT in Financial Services Can Stay Competitive in Economic Uncertainty,” featuring Emma Beckers, Senior Lead Engineer at Wells Fargo.

Having to make do with less purchasing power is challenging, but there are opportunities to help your customers generate efficiencies within IT and get more out of every penny. In this blog, we explore how Alluvio Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) can help your customers’ teams reduce costs while maintaining a flawless digital experiences.

What is Alluvio Aternity DEM?

Alluvio Aternity DEM (Digital Experience Management) is a full spectrum, digital experience management platform that provides insight into the business impact of customer and employee digital experiences. It achieves this by capturing and storing technical telemetry at scale from employee devices, business applications, and cloud-native application services.

Equipped with this comprehensive visibility into the actual user experience and device performance, IT teams can create better experiences for users and leaders can make informed business decisions on IT spend. Here’s how:

Smart Device Refresh

Typically, IT teams will refresh devices based on their age, say, every three or four years. But age alone doesn’t speak to the actual health or performance of a device. Some perfectly good devices may be thrown out too soon, and other faulty devices need to be replaced a bit sooner so an employee can optimize their productivity. Alluvio Aternity DEM offers insight into actual user experience and device performance, informing teams on when to replace devices based on performance.

What it means for your clients: intelligent device replacement helps save them money by refreshing devices exactly when they need to be replaced, and not a moment sooner.

Eliminated Software Bloat

We all keep subscriptions longer than necessary, and the same is true for enterprises. A SaaS trends report found the average company wastes more than $135,000 annually on unused, underused, or duplicate SaaS tools and this cost increases dramatically for large enterprises. Alluvio Aternity DEM gives IT the power to automatically identify software licenses that are going unused or aren’t used often.

What it means for your clients: Instantly reduce software bloat by cutting licenses that are going mostly unused and redeploy those savings in ways that can better help the business.

Curtailed Shadow IT

All too frequently, teams across an enterprise will purchase SaaS tools without going through the proper IT channels. This inevitably leads to redundancies, increased risk, and headaches for IT. But Alluvio Aternity DEM can identify shadow IT software, and either direct usage to an approved application to eliminate the additional expense, or leverage approved purchasing channels to better handle the spend.

What it means for your clients: By curtailing shadow IT, IT teams can better understand and manage the software being used by employees. At the same time, it helps IT identify and eliminate duplicate and wasteful solutions so budgets are more effectively and efficiently utilized.

Cut costs and improve performance

Many IT departments have room to gain operational efficiencies by eliminating waste, thus maximizing every dollar. These efficiencies don’t have to come at the expense of the user experience. On the contrary, reducing wasteful spending can add money back into budgets that can then be used to hire talent and fill labor gaps, reducing the burden on IT departments so they’re more productive. Alluvio Aternity DEM helps organizations save on their IT costs while at the same time enabling even better digital experiences. It’s a win-win.

To how you can put this into action for your team, register for our upcoming webinar “Budget Getting Tight? How IT Leaders Reduce Costs Without Sacrificing User Experience.”

When networks were confined to just the data center, it was easier to monitor. But now that networks stretch significantly outside the data center—all the way to the campus, remote office or cloud—the threats to the network become more prevalent because the customer’s rubber band is stretched to its limits. In doing so, keeping their distributed network compliant and secure is a challenge.

Beware bad apples

Bad actors are always trying to exploit those vulnerabilities in the far stretched network. It only takes the baddies one time to find their way into a network by running a corrupt file, non-compliant application or old operating system. If an application or OS is out of compliance, no longer supported, or is riddled with security issues, this can translate to serious loss of productivity, customer sentiment and revenue. In addition, a company can end up paying millions in fines and can have additional financial impact just in the recovery process alone.

Many highly regulated industries like finance, government or medical are trying to police themselves when it comes to such issues of compliance and security. It’s better to monitor themselves and hold their businesses up to a higher standard instead of the government passing major regulations that cause wide sweeping change, often at great expense to the business. Government regulation is often a last resort so it’s better for your customers to look after themselves—with your help. If the government gets involved, it’s often due to a catastrophic event propagated by a single vendor effecting a client and millions of their customers. And those regulations ultimately could impact every network vendor in that particular industry.

One bad apple can financially ruin the apple cart for all parties involved.

Secure networks with Alluvio NPM

Riverbed’s Alluvio Network Performance Management (NPM) portfolio recently implemented a feature enhancement across its products as a result of regulated institutions requiring this change of all their vendors. In response to the prevalence of Ransomware attacks happening across various sectors, industry leaders mandated their vendors who operated products within their networks to implement what Riverbed calls Automated Orchestration.

This recent feature integrated across Alluvio AppResponse, NetProfiler, NetIM and Portal allows any of these products to be stood up; and in the event of an internal or external threat, have the product taken down and redeployed automatically to a known safe state. This in turn saves time, money and mitigates risks associated with manual intervention. Automated Orchestration across your client’s NPM portfolio will ensure compliance as well as security so that their network keeps running and avoid the risk of potential fines or negative financial impact.

For more information on the Alluvio NPM portfolio of products, please visit the Alluvio NPM solution section of the Partner Portal.

When employees work from an office, the network team is responsible for application access and network transport issues, and has access to a mature toolset to help identify and resolve issues. As work from anywhere proliferates, the responsibility for identifying and troubleshooting remote issues in these new direct-to-cloud environments still falls within the network teams’ domain. Yet, because of the new blind spots, they lack the visibility to be effective.

When it comes to hybrid work, Level 1-2 techs need to be able to identify network access and performance issues for end users accessing business applications. They need to be able to understand:

• The scope and severity of the issue so that they can prioritize appropriately and understand if they need to escalate to level 3.
• The impact on end users so that they can document and communicate the incident to the affected end users.
• The cause of the issue so they can know which resources to call (ISP, CASB supplier, application owner, security team, device issue, etc.) and understand when the issue might be resolved.

However, the problem space has changed. There are several environmental challenges that limit NetOps visibility into application performance.

Hybrid work visibility challenges for NetOps teams

Split Tunnels

In modern hybrid work environments, it’s common to have three different routing options for traffic: direct to internet, VPN, or through a security broker such as a CASB or ZTNA. There are often routing rules established where specific applications use one route (such as the CASB) and other applications go direct to the internet. The routing or tunnel being used can have a significant impact on application performance and end user experience.

CASB

CASBs are widely adopted and create a bottleneck for performance while optimizing for security. CASBs are often implemented by the security team. They make it more difficult for the network team to troubleshoot as the tunnels add complexity and reduce visibility through encryption of traffic. In a few ad hoc tests, CASB bandwidth is as low as 3Mbps and there is added security scanning time for an additional slowdown.

Multiple gateways

There are typically multiple gateways being used by each type of tunnel. For example, users in the northeast United States may have CASB traffic tunneled to gateway X, while users in central United States are connecting to gateway Y. If only one gateway is causing problems, it is difficult to determine that. This gateway issue is also applicable to corporate VPNs.

SaaS vs corporate applications

The percentage of companies using SaaS to meet their software needs is steadily increasing, with 80% of companies relying on SaaS apps in 2022. The remaining corporate applications are usually hosted in a data center. Remote user traffic traverses a physical network which can cause additional slowdown. This is still the responsibility of the network team to diagnose.

ISP variables

Remote workers typically use their own ISP. This variability is an additional challenge when trying to identify root cause.

Home network variables

Remote workers are typically responsible for their home network. Variables such as poor Wi-Fi or congestion on the home network are an additional challenge when trying to identify root cause.

Many locations

Finally, in hybrid work environments, location is less specific than with on-premises users. There may be users in a general geographic area that are having issues due to an ISP or gateway, but it is not as easy to use a specific site or location to identify problems.

Alluvio IQ brings visibility to hybrid work

By adding Alluvio Aternity end user experience metrics to Alluvio IQ, Riverbed’s SaaS-based unified observability solution, NetOps teams can gain visibility into traffic that leaves the home computer and goes to a data center or SaaS application.

IT teams can now answer questions like:

• Which applications are having network performance issues?
• How many users are impacted, and how severe is the impact?
• How are the impacted users accessing the application? (VPN, Direct to internet)
• Which locations are affected?

To learn more about how Alluvio IQ helps your customers shift left, visit this page.

Often related to the remote work issue is SSE (Security Service Edge), which security teams use to secure cloud computing, edge computing and remote work. SSE is the security portion of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge). Its capabilities include access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable use control.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor’s SSE platform.

The problem with both remote work and security service edge is that monitoring network performance is extremely difficult by traditional means. Riverbed customers have voiced that the security team uses SSE to build tunnels upon tunnels, making it next to impossible to figure out where slowdowns are occurring. This is why we announced the next release of Alluvio IQ unified observability service.

Alluvio IQ supports Alluvio Aternity

Customers need to know when connectivity or transport issues are affecting performance, regardless of where the user is located or which type of application they are using (data center, cloud, or SaaS app). With the integration of Alluvio Aternity, Alluvio IQ unified observability surfaces impactful incidents from both physical networks, remote work environments, cloud apps, as well as SSE-protected apps.

This release adds the first of the Aternity metrics, specifically Application-Location and Application-Activity data. Application-level metrics are native and derived high-level metrics associated with application performance from the user perspective. Activity-level metrics provide detailed metrics associated with the “activities” that comprise an application, such as download a Salesforce report. Activity-level metrics offer excellent visibility into issues affecting a specific activity or part of an application.

Alluvio IQ leverages these metrics to identify performance problems where hybrid work or SSE tunneling is involved. It includes details regarding where the problems are occurring, the user impact, and problem severity, including:

• Which applications are having network performance issues?
• How severe is the impact?
• How many users are impacted?
• Which locations are impacted?
• How are the impacted users accessing the application? CASB, VPN, Direct to internet?
• Is the issue caused by a specific ISP or VPN?

Read the solution brief on Monitoring Remote Work and SSE Environments.

Third-party integrations

Importing/exporting third-party data is the number one question asked about Alluvio IQ. Alluvio IQ now allows customers to use data from any third-party solution with a public REST API. Alluvio IQ can pull third-party data into its runbooks for use in decision branches to make decisions based on this data or to add visualizations to impact summaries to tailor the automated investigations to an organization’s specific troubleshooting processes.

Alternatively, Alluvio IQ runbooks can push incident data to third-party solutions. For example, Alluvio IQ can send context-rich, actionable alerts to solutions like Slack or ServiceNow for consolidated alerting.

New third-party integrations feature enables user to the import or export of actionable insights to solutions like ServiceNow.

Check out the solution brief on how Alluvio IQ’s third-party integrations work.

Other important new features

Alluvio IQ has achieved SOC2 Type II and ISO 27001 security certifications. These certifications give organizations confidence that Alluvio IQ has the policies, procedures, and technology to keep their data secure and private. Lastly, Alluvio IQ is now also hosted in Frankfurt, Germany to support our European customers.

More info

Powered by full-fidelity telemetry and leveraging a combination of AI/ML and workflow automation, Alluvio IQ unified observability service detects business-impacting events while facilitating fast, efficient problem diagnosis. Visit this page for more information on Alluvio IQ and contact your Riverbed account manager for details about how to sell Alluvio IQ.

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