Moving from siloed visibility to a multi-million dollar advantage

To deal with heightened regulatory pressure and operational complexity, some of the world’s largest financial institutions are turning to NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights to regain control of their sprawling IT infrastructure. By transforming fragmented infrastructure data into a unified intelligence layer, Data Infrastructure Insights has become the backbone for smarter decisions and for automation at scale. And for one specific financial services institution, it delivered over $4 million in savings within the first year of implementation.

What began as a need for chargeback transparency for that institution rapidly evolved into a companywide transformation. Data Infrastructure Insights has become the organization’s single source of truth across storage, compute, and applications, driving smarter decisions that have enabled automation, a strengthened security posture, and increased resilience.

This institution was suffering from the following challenges:

These issues resulted in nearly $7 million worth of annual inefficiencies, operational blind spots, slow incident handlining across teams, and noncompliance risk.

After a comprehensive data discovery assessment, the NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights team helped develop a tailored plan to streamline infrastructure operations across the business.

With Data Infrastructure Insights, the organization has gained the following capabilities:

• Accurate monthly chargebacks with live business annotations
• Dashboard views for application owners
• Effective disaster recovery planning
• Incident investigations
• Automation triggers through Ansible
• Sustainability and end-of-life planning
• AWS-native service integration for enhanced scalability and performance
• ServiceNow integration for streamlined workflows
• Prefiltering and smart tagging to normalize and to correlate data before ingestion into Splunk, reducing licensing fees

This organization uses Data Infrastructure Insights to inform both operational and strategic decisions across storage, compute, and application layers. The solution has become a critical foundation for infrastructure intelligence, risk mitigation, and the execution of business-critical automation workflows.

With NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights, the financial services institution underwent a significant transformation. By consolidating multidomain inventory and by enabling detailed annotations, Data Infrastructure Insights has become the single source of truth for the organization. This foundation enables precise, business-aligned billing of storage and compute resources, with live tagging and custom cost models that integrate directly into FinOps tools, so monthly chargebacks are both accurate and transparent.

Resilience and security improved significantly

Disaster recovery processes are now faster and safer because Data Infrastructure Insights enables data-driven mapping of applications to infrastructure, supported by robust API integrations and historical tagging. The institution’s cybersecurity posture is stronger than ever, with the solution identifying encryption gaps across volumes and providing clear visibility into encrypted versus unencrypted assets. Proactive risk management has also been enhanced through a deeper understanding of application locations and risk profiles, supported by historical usage data and comprehensive dashboarding.

Automation and forecasting advanced

Data Infrastructure Insights has taken automation to the next level by powering auto-triggered remediation workflows and by serving as a data source for Ansible, enabling self-healing capabilities across the environment. Capacity forecasting has improved as well, with Data Infrastructure Insights tracking growth trends, modeling end-of-life risks, and supporting long-term planning. Audit and governance readiness has been bolstered by the ability to tag, to track, and to report on all asset ownership and changes, maintaining a long-term metadata repository for compliance needs.

Operational efficiency and cost optimization soared

By integrating Data Infrastructure Insights with ServiceNow, the institution has transformed its approach to incident management and change workflows. The solution has significantly reduced the teams’ manual efforts and has improved response times. This streamlined workflow has not only enhanced operational efficiency, but also strengthened governance and compliance across the organization.

The institution has also realized significant cloud cost optimization with Data Infrastructure Insights. Ingestion and observability expenses are lower than with traditional log-based tools, and Data Infrastructure Insights provides an alternative to solutions like Splunk for infrastructure visibility. By integrating AWS Cloud storage, the institution has unified its infrastructure data, enabling seamless visibility and management across storage, compute, and applications. Through these advancements, Data Infrastructure Insights has empowered the institution to make smarter, data-driven decisions, to optimize costs, and to enhance both operational resilience and compliance.

In the context of ongoing acquisitions, divestments, and regulatory scrutiny, financial services firms face increasing pressure to:

• Justify infrastructure spending to regulators and governing boards.
• Prepare for audits with accurate, up-to-date asset lineage.
• Enable automation without sacrificing risk controls.
• Gain infrastructure-wide insights without ballooning Splunk or log-based costs.
• Reduce the number of monitoring tools and integrate with existing service workflows.

Data Infrastructure Insights has become a strategic tool for aligning IT, risk, and financial operations. Data Infrastructure Insights helps make every infrastructure decision data-driven, compliant, and cost-aware, and it provides an alternative to solutions like Splunk for infrastructure visibility.

Financial services institutions are at varying stages of modernizing their legacy estates, all while navigating increasing regulatory scrutiny and mounting competitive pressures.

Data Infrastructure Insights empowers leaders to:

• Simplify decision-making during acquisition or transformation.
• Drive down operational costs while increasing confidence in their organization’s disaster recovery and security posture.
• Create a platform for smart automation without needing to rip and replace their existing tools.

For forward-thinking financial institutions, NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights isn’t just a heterogeneous tool. It’s a strategic enabler for data-driven decisions, enhanced resilience, compliance, and a competitive advantage in a complex digital landscape.

Find out how Data Infrastructure Insights can help your organization enhance your operations and gain a competitive edge. Explore the resources and request your own personal demonstration.