Introduction
SNS Bank, a part of the SNS REAAL Group, is offering private and business customers a complete set of financial products such as mortgages, savings, investments, payments, loans, and insurances. SNS Bank is aiming for a top position when it comes to mortgage and asset management products. A profit of € 173 million and total assets of € 42 billion makes SNS Bank one of the top 5 banks in the Netherlands.
SNS and internet
Internet is an important transaction channel, whereby a client have unlimited access to the bank from anywhere at any time. The SNS website is visited 3.5 million times every month and the number of online banking accounts is growing rapidly. Every month is about one million transactions processed for internet customers. Internet offers a good opportunity for SNS to show the innovative profile of the bank. Good examples of this is the launch of Bill/MSN for internet payment and the cooperation with Microsoft.
All internet applications used by SNS Bank and the other labels are developed in-house. The applications are deployed in a complex infrastructure built up on a mixture of Windows, UNIX, and mainframe servers which all run various system software and applications.
SNS and Moniforce
The IT departments of both the bank and insurance divisions are both monitoring the availability of the applications with webAlarm. webAlarm is giving IT operations a instant notification when something goes wrong
SNS Bank is the first division who has chosen to use webProbe to monitor performance and availability aspects of their online-banking applications. Business and IT have together defined system requirements with regards to:
1) Availability
2) Performance
3) Security
To continuously monitor their applications against those criteria is of strategic and operational importance to SNS Bank. It was decided not to limit system monitoring to solely looking after every single infrastructure component.
“We were looking for a solution where we could monitor the complete experience of our online customers, and give us insight in response times, quality of service, availability of business transactions as well as customer behavior.”, says Emiel van Doorn, Internet Service Manager. “
“Our old solutions did not meet all our requirements. The limited functionality and high costs in combination with bad support made us start looking for a better solution. In Moniforce we have found a vendor that with webProbe has a solution that meets all our requirements. webProbe has become a strategic part of our service management infrastructure. Through integrating webProbe with our system monitoring tools we now have a ‘one-stop dashboard view’. The flexibility and service from Moniforce fits well into our fast changing internet development and short time to market.”
webProbe and webAlarm ‘in practice’
van Doorn: “We are very pleased with webProbe and webAlarm, as we have a managed to reach a number of advantages.”
Some advantages: