Paessler PRTG is the best choice for cooperative credit union system Sicoob

About Sicoob

The Brazilian Credit Union System (Sistema de Cooperativas de Crédito do Brasil; Sicoob) offers financial products and services and shares the results with its members by investing the funds raised in their own communities. Sicoob’s credit unions are solid and safe financial institutions, regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil and part of a strong system of solidarity.

The difference between credit unions and banks is that banks are public limited companies, which relate to their clients and aim to achieve results for their shareholders. Credit unions are partnerships, guided by associative principles, aimed at the well-being of their members and the communities in which they operate.

Part of the system is the National Confederation of Sicoob Cooperatives, whose purpose is to defend the interests of the cooperatives represented, offer services, promote standardization, supervision, and operational, financial, regulatory, and technological integration of the more than 2,000 points of physical presence, distributed in 25 units of the federation:

Banco Cooperativo do Brasil S. A. (Bancoob), which specializes in serving credit unions and whose shareholding control belongs to the Sicoob unions; Bancoob DTVM, a securities distributor; Sicoob Previ, a foundation that offers a supplementary pension plan; Cabal Brasil, a card brand and processor; and Ponta Administradora de Consórcios. It also has the Sicoob Guarantee Fund (FGS), which lends credibility to the system and guarantees the protection of the resources of its more than 2.5 million members.

“PRTG has raised the level of performance of our Telecom team in managing the network, identifying faults even before the telecom operators do and monitoring critical circuits for the business in real time.”

José Eduardo Godoi, Team Manager at Sicoob

The challenge

Network administrators need an efficient, optimized, and cost-effective solution for managing data traffic and configuring installed devices. The best tools for large corporate networks must be able to offer a high level of detail while placing little burden on the telecommunications equipment being monitored.

Responsible for the payroll of more than 18,000 employees, Sicoob offers differentiated banking products to users of financial services. The company's growth required the executives to make the telecommunications activities, which are contracted through five different operators, more robust.

Based on this, Sicoob decided to maintain a map of its network with a real view of service management. However, with more than 2,500 circuits distributed throughout Brazil, the service contracted with the telecom operators fell below adequate levels.

Criteria for choosing PRTG

José Eduardo Godoi, Team Manager at Sicoob, explained that although he had already tried a similar monitoring software, he chose Paessler PRTG Network Monitor because of its usability. “We chose PRTG because of its ease of use and the customization of its features to meet our needs,” he said. Sicoob's network monitoring is carried out on a VMware virtual platform on a Windows Server.

Since one of the criteria for adopting PRTG in the project was the mobility of the service, it was essential to allow users to use the monitoring tool anywhere and on all platforms. “We also considered the number of circuits that would be managed and the possibility of extracting real-time information such as unavailability and bandwidth consumption,” Godoi explains.

Paessler's software uses more than 8,000 sensors to monitor switches and routers. The implementation was also designed to provide transparency and increase engagement with the software.

“We created a custom PRTG map to be used in a monitoring dashboard that provided an overview of the entire WAN network. This panel enabled the Telecom team at Sicoob's production management to improve control over long-distance network management, which resulted in transparency for both the business areas and the system's users,” Godoi adds.

Smart choices generate benefits and savings

The cost-benefit ratio and the quality of incident handling are fundamental to the management of a corporate network. Paessler's software won Sicoob over not only because of its ability to ease the complexity of the layers, but also because it copes well with gaps that competitors can't fill.

In addition, one of the major challenges for network administrators is the average response time of the operator in the event of an unforeseen temporary fluctuation. The use of PRTG means that the time taken to open a call with the operators can be halved, with an impact on the rationalization of resources.

Sicoob estimates that, with the results of implementing PRTG, the cooperative will save up to R$1.5 million per year on contracts with telecommunications operators, since the network monitoring software enables Sicoob not to include proactive services in new contracts.

Other advantages obtained with PRTG include integration with mobile devices, automated switch control, and the generation of link availability and utilization reports. For Godoi, the benefits provided by the software exceeded expectations by going beyond the technical aspect.

Conclusion

“The main reasons that influenced our decision for PRTG were its ability to solve our problems, mainly because it allowed us to better manage the WAN network, giving us a view of the network that telecom operators couldn't deliver. PRTG has raised the level of performance of our Telecom team in managing the network, identifying faults before the telecom operators do and monitoring critical circuits for the business in real time,” concludes Godoi.

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