Advantages Of Noc Services - Remote Noc And Outsourced Noc
Business is increasingly dependent on Information Technology
, and high availability of IT systems is critical to keep the business going. A NOC or short for network operations center is the centralized command center for most IT Service providers (including internal IT organizations). This is where all systems for clients or the organization are monitored, usually and mostly on a round the clock, 24/7/365 basis for outages and issues.
Network operations centers or NOC Services primarily come from the world of telecommunications. Large telecom providers need to deploy teams to continuously monitor the state of their networks for outages and problems and then fix them. This concept has been adopted by the Information Technology world and is quite prevalent within it now. While the large companies deploy internal NOCs, small companies use outsourced NOC or remote NOC as well.
The foundation for NOC Services is built on a monitoring and management platform which monitors all aspects of the network. The monitoring system is continuously looking out for vital signs and indications of problems and alerts NOC technicians when something is out of order. NOC technicians then investigate, triage and resolve issues to restore normalcy. Many times these issues are resolved even without having any user impact or loss of productivity and revenue loss. This pro-active maintenance concept is what is referred to as managed services.
The concept of NOCs was limited to large enterprises to begin with. With time, this has become quite commoditized and now small and mid size companies are also able to take advantage of this. This is where Remote NOC or outsourced NOC players come in. These companies provide 3rd party NOC services to small and mid size companies who do not find it cost effective to setup their own NOCs. The shared-resourced and multi-tenant concept makes it a win-win for the provider as well as for the clients seeking the service.
One of the critical factors to keep in mind with outsourced NOCs and remote NOCs is around security. Using 3rd party services to monitoring your critical infrastructure requires you providing the NOC provider with a fair amount of access to your network. One needs to ensure that this aspect is well planned and accounted for. The other thing to keep in mind is around Service Level Agreements or SLAs. The provider needs to provide you with contract based metrics on things like response times, resolution times etc.