Inside the NOC you will find a team of technicians (NOC engineers, analysts or operators of the NOC) and probably several managers or supervisors of the support team. NOC staff requires specific skill sets to quickly monitor, maintain and resolve performance problems within the network. This level of knowledge is generally beyond the reach of the unskilled IT professional. NOC technicians generally have significant work experience, particularly in tools and network monitoring. Many also have advanced certifications in the sector.
Since a large team focused solely on network performance is not feasible for many smaller organizations, third party service providers also offer NOC services as an alternative to internal NOC.
How do you choose the right tools for your NOC?
The tool you invest in depends largely on your company's needs, but your NOC requires a tool or combination of tools that provide the following:
A complete view of your infrastructure: physical, virtual or in the cloud.
Automation: to reduce repetitive tasks, free up level 1 staff to focus on top priority problems while reducing alarm fatigue.
Ticket management: in this way it is possible to view information on open tickets, including priority tasks and assigned technician, to ensure rapid resolution of internal and external problems.
Incident reporting: a tool that provides visual analysis, graphical representation of thresholds, alarms, indicators and trends simplifies the investigation of problems and their documentation for the future.
A simple interface and implementation: you want to see immediate benefits and you don't have to struggle through a long and complex implementation and a long learning curve.
Scalability: as your business grows, you want to make sure that the NOC is able to manage it.
The tool you choose should give you complete visibility of your network and allow you to investigate, investigate problems and improve your overall response to accidents over time.
The network operations center is one of the most important functional teams in IT. Every day you have internal and external customers who trust your IT services. You have SLA (service level agreements) to comply with, main business productivity to allow and full digital experience for your customers to maintain.
It is important to have a NOC that can prevent catastrophic disruptions and maximize the uptime of all IT services. Many organizations have a NOC, but it can be difficult to maintain it with all staff, properly trained and well equipped with the best tools and automation. Organizations that are unable to maintain an effective NOC may be more successful with third party service providers, also known as managed service providers.
