Countrywide Home Loans - Case Study
Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., the principal subsidiary of Countrywide Financial Corporation, is a leading residential mortgage lender and servicer. Countrywide's goal since its inception in 1969 has been to give every American an opportunity to own their own home. An innovator in home mortgage, re-financing, and home equity lending, Countrywide has long been a leading online lender. The Countrywide® family of companies' total assets exceed $45 billion with more than 30,000 employees in more than 500 offices nationwide.
"With NerveCenter in place, we get real-time and precise data on the IT operational efficiency of our entire network. Our ability to continually monitor our network and make adjustments on the fly results in our highest possible levels of customer service."
Countrywide's Situation
Countrywide Financial Corporation has more than 500 branch offices, and keeping all of these offices operational from a technological point of view is a critical endeavor. A key part of this endeavor is keeping the branches connected to Countrywide® Corporate over the company’s wide area network.
The Challenge
To ensure that wide area networking was continually available, the company complemented its existing frame relay solution with a dial-up backup solution. The dial-up solution was intended to self-activate when the main frame-relay network became unavailable. At times, however, the dial-up connection was kicking in even when the frame-relay WAN was still available, in some cases costing Countrywide thousands of dollars in phone charges that would not have been necessary using the NerveCenter model.
The Solution: NerveCenter
Countrywide chose NerveCenter, from OpenService Inc., to continually monitor wide area frame connectivity and backup dial-up services for the company’s headquarters and branch offices. NerveCenter correlates events from security sensors, network devices and applications. It uses sophisticated behavior models and PERL-based extensibility to filter through voluminous security and network event data to pinpoint critical problems and automatically launch appropriate corrective actions based on customer-defined policies. One of its principal uses is to reduce the flood of false alarms, known as “false positives,” in network and security operations centers to enable administrators to identify the most important threats to their IT infrastructure in real time.
In Countrywide’s case, NerveCenter provided visibility into the Nortel frame-relay networking equipment, leveraging its ability to create custom alarms and perform automated diagnostic functions. NerveCenter continually checks the status of the WAN, and uses state and collision data to determine the root cause of any problems. NerveCenter is used to determine whether the backup WAN has been activated erroneously, enabling Countrywide’s IT group to quickly isolate any issues and save on unnecessary dial-up charges. Countrywide achieves all these benefits with a single primary NerveCenter instance, with a hot backup server providing standby coverage for the highest system availability.
The Outcome
Since implementing NerveCenter in 1997, Countrywide has created a smooth-running network infrastructure that ensures all locations are running as efficiently as possible. NerveCenter has eliminated instances in which the dial-up connection initiates unnecessarily, resulting in significant dollar savings. In addition, NerveCenter has provided greater visibility into the performance, configuration and availability of both Countrywide’s internal and wide-area networks. Countrywide’s IT organization now has the ability to check and manage the state of more than 500 branch networks as well as their corporate infrastructure, enabling centralized management of Countrywide’s highly distributed branch office and network architecture.