Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 48 | Page 42

COUNTRY FOCUS : SOUTH AFRICA
First National Bank ( FNB ) recently deployed Cisco Tetration platform , which provides a detailed view-both real-time and historical-of application connectivity , dependencies and data flows across a hybrid IT environment . Eugene Pretorius , CIO , Infrastructure and Security Services , FNB , tells Intelligent CIO Africa why the implementation of Cisco Tetration platform is a game changer for South Africa ’ s oldest bank .

The game changer for S oldest bank

Hillbrow Tower – Johannesburg ,
South Africa

First National Bank ( FNB ) is the oldest bank in South Africa and one of the country ’ s ‘ big four ’ financial institutions . As a division of FirstRand Limited , a large financial services conglomerate , which trades on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange ( JSE ) under the symbol FSR , FNB is also listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange ( BSE ) under the symbol FNBB and is a constituent of the BSE Domestic Company Index .

Challenge : Accelerate problem resolution in the data centre
Eugene Pretorius , CIO , Infrastructure and Security Services at FNB , was tired of the blame game . Every time FNB experienced a service disruption or dip in application performance , fingers would point at the networking team .
“ The network doesn ’ t discriminate . It ’ s either working or everything is down . It ’ s not going to pick and choose things to disrupt ,” said Pretorius . “ But whenever something went wrong , the network was always blamed .” In these circumstances , representatives from FNB ’ s network , data centre and server teams would gather in a ‘ war room ’ to troubleshoot the issue . It would take hours – sometimes days – to find a solution . And many times , a root cause was never identified , leaving the distinct possibility of problem recurrence and the blind troubleshooting that followed .
“ It was clear we needed better visibility in the data centre . We needed the ability to see exactly what was happening , where it was happening and why ,” he recalled .
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