Leading BFSI company saves $120K by preventing outages with OpManager

Operating within the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, this organization is a prominent stockbroker, corporate insurance and financial services provider. It operates under stringent regulations set by the Reserve Bank of India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority. Its portfolio includes trading in shares, mutual funds, loan disbursements, and insurance accreditation within the B2B space. Given the nature of the BFSI industry, the firm relies heavily on its IT infrastructure to ensure seamless service delivery to its customers and to ensure regulatory compliance.

Industry

BFSI

Network size

5000+ devices

Experience

30+ years

The role of IT infrastructure in business continuity

As a financial services provider, timely service delivery is paramount, and even a minor IT disruption can result in financial losses amounting to crores while severely impacting the firm's reputation. It must also comply with SEBI regulations, which require reporting of any technical glitch within 15 minutes and limiting major technical disruptions to a maximum of five disruptions per year. Exceeding this threshold can lead to heavy penalties and loss of customers.

Moreover, IT outages directly affect loan disbursement timelines, potentially damaging the firm's credibility. Ensuring uninterrupted business operations is, therefore, a top priority for the IT team.

IT architecture

The firm operates a primarily on-premises IT infrastructure. Key components of its IT infrastructure include:

  • Workforce: 5,000 employees
  • IT assets: 450 servers, 35-45 network devices, an overall of 5,100 devices
  • Data centers: Two, located in Mumbai and Noida

The IT team comprise 50 members with specialized teams for support, end-user management, infrastructure, and security. An additional 150-member development team operates out of Jodhpur. The firm utilizes ManageEngine OpManager for managing its IT operations and relies on ManageEngine Endpoint Central for handling patch management.

Challenges before implementing OpManager

Prior to adopting OpManager, the firm faced several IT management challenges, including:

  • The threat of outages that could garner hefty fines from regulators.
  • Lack of comprehensive visibility for 5,000+ devices.
  • Operational inefficiencies in troubleshooting network issues that increased both time and costs associated with IT management.

Evaluation and selecting OpManager

Given these challenges, the firm sought a comprehensive, one-stop solution to address its IT needs. During the evaluation phase, the leadership team determined that OpManager effectively met all its operational requirements.

Further, the solution's user-friendly interface and cost-effectiveness compared to alternative solutions, prompted Siddharth, the firm's IT manager, to trust OpManager. "OpManager is easy to use—even beginners can navigate it effortlessly," he said.

OpManager features that helped

Real-time visibility with intuitive Dashboards

With over 5,000 devices, having complete visibility of the availability and performance of the network was a challenge. This meant the IT team did not notice underperforming devices or outages before they occurred.

Using OpManager, they were able to address this challenge. The dashboard provided an at-a-glance view of the entire network.

The IT teams had the option to create their own dashboards that covered the metrics they required. These metrics, given in widgets like the Devices by CPU utilization and Devices with Alarms widgets, helped the IT team to proactively identify devices that were facing impending outages and fix the issues.

Proactive server health monitoring

Servers are the backbone of our operations, directly impacting business continuity and service delivery

Siddharth IT Manager

With servers playing a vital role—from processing financial transactions and hosting customer data to running core applications for loan disbursements, policy servicing, and compliance reporting—even the slightest server downtime could disrupt operations, delay services, and impact customer trust.

To ensure 24/7 server availability and peak performance, the organization relied again on OpManager. With real-time alerts on key metrics like CPU utilization, response time, and IOPS, the IT team could proactively detect and resolve issues before they escalated. This continuous monitoring and optimization ensured that all financial services ran smoothly without any interruptions.

Comprehensive VM performance monitoring

The firm heavily relies on virtual machines (VMs) to run critical applications, including CRM and risk analysis applications. Given the BFSI industry's need for high availability and zero downtime, VMs provide the redundancy and flexibility required to keep operations running without disruption.

Scalability is another key advantage—VMs allow the organization to scale resources up or down effortlessly, ensuring efficient performance during peak loads while avoiding unnecessary infrastructure costs. However, managing a vast VM environment can be challenging without the right tools.

OpManager simplified the firm's VM management by offering a single-console view of all VMs across different hypervisors, along with their associated performance metrics. This centralized monitoring enabled the IT team to efficiently allocate resources, preventing VM sprawl and optimizing utilization.

Siddharth said OpManager's Top VMs by CPU Over-Allocation dashboard helped the team identify VMs consuming excessive CPU resources and reallocate computing power to those in need, ensuring seamless operations across critical applications.

End-to-end storage network management

Regulatory bodies have mandated a 70% storage utilization threshold, requiring the companies to allocate additional storage if usage exceeds this limit. OpManager's threshold-based alerting feature helped the firm comply with this regulation by setting predefined limits and receiving real-time alerts whenever disk or memory utilization reached the assigned threshold.

Apart from compliance, OpManager also supported capacity planning by providing detailed reports on key metrics such as CPU, disk, and memory utilization across both physical and virtual devices. These reports classify devices into three categories—undersized, oversized, and idle—offering data-driven insights into usage trends. This classification enabled the IT team to optimize resource allocation, prevent wastage, and ensure efficient scaling based on real-time demand.

ROI and business impact

The implementation of OpManager has resulted in tangible benefits for the BFSI firm, including:

  • Avoidance of regulatory penalties: Penalties from regulatory bodies can heavily impact the organization's revenue. OpManager has helped reduce the risk of outages, effectively enabling the firm to comply with the regulatory bodies. Siddharth expressed his relief and highlighted the role of OpManager in reducing the unnecessary costs.
  • Optimizing workforce: In terms of cost savings, the firm was able to optimize its IT workforce, performing powerful tasks without requiring additional staff. This helped the firm reduce hiring costs of about 8 lakhs annually.
  • Reduced IT downtime: OpManager enabled the firm to proactively identify issues and avoid outages effectively reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR) by 50%, meaning higher operational efficiency overall.
OpManager has been a game changer, preventing unplanned outages saving an estimated INR 1.15 crores (USD 120,000) annually from penalties.

Siddharth IT Manager

Looking forward: Imbibing AI in ITOM

As part of its future IT strategy, the firm aims to integrate AI-driven automation to its operations. ManageEngine's initiatives to enhance OpManager with intelligent capabilities will be key, and the IT team is eager to adopt these updates.

Moving beyond real-time alerts, they are particularly interested in predictive insights, including the newly introduced Zia Dashboard, which analyzes trends and recommends proactive measures to prevent potential issues.

With the firm relying on its own data centers, the team is also evaluating the Forecast Reports feature, which predicts when server resources will likely reach critical thresholds—such as 80%, 90%, or 100%—allowing them to allocate resources proactively and prevent costly downtime.

With ManageEngine continuously innovating to meet customer needs—especially by driving AI-powered solutions—the company remains keen on leveraging these advancements for a more intelligent and efficient IT infrastructure.

 
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