What is Network Operations Centre and its Uses?

 

A network operations centre is basically like a centralized location where IT teams continuously monitor the performance of a network. You can consider NOC to be the first line of defence against network disruptions and failures.

With network monitoring, most organizations can gain complete visibility into their network so that anomalies can be detected and immediate steps can be taken to prevent problems or resolve them as they come forth. The NOC is meant for overseeing infrastructure and equipment, wireless systems, databases, network-related devices, firewalls, telecommunications, dashboards, etc.

The management services also include detailed monitoring of the customer support calls along with helpdesk ticketing and integration of customer network tools. This enables NOC to play an important role in making sure that a positive customer experience is delivered.

NOCs can be built either internally or can be located on-premise and many times within the data centre. Sometimes, their function can also be outsourced to an external organization that specializes in network and infrastructure monitoring and management. Irrespective of the design of the NOC functionality, the staff is responsible for spotting issues and making quick decisions.

Purpose of NOC

The first and foremost goal of any NOC is to maintain optimal network performance and availability. NOC ensures continuous uptime and manages many critical activities including monitoring the network for problems that require attention.

A network operations centre also ensures server, network, and device management including software installation, troubleshooting, and distribution across all devices. NOC ensures incident response including managing power failures and communication line issues. It ensures security because it manages threat analysis and helps in tool deployment along with the security operations.

NOC also ensures backup and storage, data management, firewall and intrusion prevention system management, policy enforcement, service level agreement, and freelancer management. Network management and performance monitoring are difficult to tackle in the present times. Today’s organizations deal with complex networks spanning across the globe, employees working from home and a vast number of devices.

There is an added volume of users, website traffic and malware that impacts network performance so the potential for problems comes from almost anywhere. There are times when even small issues can lead to downtime in productivity and one’s ability to meet the customer needs.

The network outages affect the revenue, and the reputation of both the IT team and organization and also hurt the revenue. Keeping this in mind, NOCs are designed to prevent the downtime just so that the customers and the internal end-users do not realize when inevitable incidents take place.

NOC Best Practices

The efficient network operations centres team use a wide range of best practices. Some of them are mentioned below:

• Monitoring a range of information and network systems including communication circuits, LAN/WAN systems, cloud resources, firewalls, switches, routers, VoIP systems, etc.
• Offering timely response to all incidents, solving performance issues, and outages.
• Categorizing some problems for escalation to appropriate the technical teams.
• Recognizing, identifying, and prioritizing incidents in accordance with customer business requirements, operational impact, and organizational policies.
• Documenting actions in accordance with standard company policies and procedures.
• Collecting performance reports for many systems and reporting trends to senior personnel for predicting future issues.
• Working with internal and external technical teams to create and update knowledge base articles.
• Notifying the customer and third-party service providers about issues, remediation, and outages.
• Performing the basic system testing and completing operational tasks.
• Supporting the technical teams in operational settings with high uptime requirements. The different shift schedules may also include day or evening hours.

In addition to the network performance, application availability is also important. Both of them must be focused on driving business goals for enterprises and service providers. Shifting applications to the cloud is the key driver in network operations sending more time on application availability and performance as we go forward.

Specifically, the network operations team needs to make sure internal and external networks and services do not impede application availability but instead accelerate delivery.

When to consider NOC?

You must consider a NOC if you want:

1. Reduce Network Downtime

NOC functionality is an excellent way to minimize network downtime which can be especially useful on important days. Businesses that experience downtime during crucial times may face steep downtime costs and productivity issues.

Even if the business does not dramatically suffer from occasional network downtime, you must keep in mind that the hackers know that not everyone has consistent support which also means that they might think of taking advantage of the network when it is least protected.

Keep the network security on high alter so that the network functionality can be maximized and you can keep the hackers at bay.

2. Increased Assistance

Your in-house IT department may need more assistance. On a daily basis, there are so many tasks to complete that businesses often benefit from contracting out some of the low-level tasks to a third party company.

While you may think that network monitoring can be a task that is important for ensuring network health and security, you can choose not to exhaust the in-house IT departmental resources on this task. This is more so when there are other important jobs that must be completed.

When the network operations centre handles network monitoring, an in-house IT department gets freed up to complete other projects including upgrading the network or even positioning if for future use.

3. Professional Expertise

The network operations centre can also be very useful for you if you have little to no internal IT support. In case you think that you have little or not fully dedicated IT staff then you are leaving the management of your network to another employee with limited knowledge.

Taking the risk of leaving your network security to an employee who is not an IT professional can put you and your company at a risk. When you outsource the monitoring to a NOC, the burden gets lifted from internal employees and the network gets protected easily.

Benefits of Network Operations Centre

1. Cyber Attacks

The common cyberattacks including ransomware and phishing pose threats to the security of business operations and sensitive data. The fact is that Network Operations Centre is important for reducing these threats.

NOC is a tiered system of trained IT professionals for monitoring the network and quickly solving issues that arise along with it. The employees are trained to offer customer services also which means that the problems will not be solved quickly but professionally.

2. Quick Resolving

With the help desks, so many problems may not be identified until end-user contact the help desk about it. This leads to problems with some network concerns such as cyber threats because typically an end-user will not see a cyber threat until it gets too late already.

On the other side, the NOC functionality is perfect for identifying cyber threats before they have an opportunity to attack. Solving the network issues can reduce downtime and secure the data in a better way.

3. Customization

The network operations centre can customize the offerings for fitting a business’s needs. For example, NOCs have consistent security options for companies who need security and proactive network monitoring outside of standard business hours. 

The right NOC is able to customize parts of their offerings for the company such as times of day when the network is monitored, the security software that gets installed on the network and so on.

4. Internal IT Assistance

In case a business has an internal IT department and just needs some support in managing employee support tickets then the NOC works with the department in a limited capacity to take the workload off. This works by handling employee help requests.

Making some space for the internal IT team allows the NOC functionality to complete other projects such as infrastructure upgrades and future planning which then leads to a more productive and efficient department.

5. Network Uptime

The NOCs have goals that go way beyond just maintaining security. Another one of the objectives is to make sure that there is minimal network downtime. One of the ways in which the Network Operations Centre ensures the uptime is by always backing up the data.

In case there is a network outage, consistent backups mean that the data can be recovered quickly with minimal data loss. In addition, NOCs can find processes that must be altered and streamlined for improving network functionality by remotely monitoring the network issues.

For example, an overloaded network server that causes traffic bottlenecks can be adjusted to speed up the end-user processes. The network uptimes ensure business productivity and it can prevent the costs associated with network downtime as well.

6. Improved Productivity

The NOCs use different security software platforms for proactively noticing computer and network issues while taking steps that can address problems before the end-users see a dip in network functionality.

Proactive monitoring and issue resolution mean that the end-users do not have to create many support tickets. This frees up the time that is otherwise spent on chatting with an agent and waiting for the issue to get fixed.

7. Constant Network Monitoring

With NOC, you can expect increased support with around the clock network monitoring. The complex interconnected platforms are developing in the network infrastructures. Allowing the engineers to look at your network is much better than using automated monitoring.

These engineers are skilled to offer around the clock support. They monitor the network all the time but after a point, they can prove to be inefficient and costly. The implementation of NOC will give you value and will make you efficient with not just a skilled staff but also bringing impairments and outages to your attention.

8. Immediate Handling

The remote monitoring of networks with a NOC provider offers businesses the simple ability to have incidents taken care of at all times of the day or night by the remote staff. You can also be notified about the problems immediately.

Basically, with NOC the company is made aware of the problems the instant it arises. This way, it becomes easy to address the problem and manage it using different channels.

9. Saving Time and Labour

The IT departments can focus on procedures for business development with the use of NOC. All too often, many companies do not use the ability of the IT departments.

The companies invest energy in performing operations that can be outsourced to free them from more tasks. This examination of risk, stockpiling information and investigating applications can be outsourced to a network operations centre easily.

Doing this ends up saving a lot of time for IT teams to focus on more complex tasks that are not being outsourced to the NOC. When you come down to doing it, you will see that a lot of time is being saved and that too effectively.

Basically, the IT team gets free to do things that are more vital to the company than analyzing data and monitoring the network. This helps them to work on issues that arise because of importance rather than routine maintenance of systems. Ultimately this increases job satisfaction and also productivity because they are not doing mundane tasks.

10. Latest Infrastructure

The infrastructure must be of high quality while offering superior performance. The providers of NOC services get a benefit because they offer the latest benefits of hardware, software, and other tools that give the clients solutions best suited to them.

Some of the top providers of NOC services have recently started offering more solutions administrating in real-time and reporting on-demand as well. This has increased the need for services alot more.

Conclusion

The Network Operations Centre is responsible for maintaining the systems and networks of an organization. It also prevents catastrophic failures while maximizing uptime. NOC must be staffed by people who understand how to use technology and it should have proper training and equipment as well.

Encaptechno offers services that meet these challenges effectively. We have an industry-leading portfolio of networking monitoring and management services that is created from the ground up for addressing the challenges faced by the organizations of today. Get in touch to know more about our services and benefit from them.