To drive new revenue, it is important to Improve and optimize the network. Organizations are increasingly focusing on improving their Network Operations Centre capability due to this reason. Recently we saw Vodafone open an AI-equipped Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Qatar. It is expected to play a pivotal role in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of Vodafone Qatar’s connectivity services.
A Network Operations refers to the operations that corporations and service providers rely on, which are conducted by internal networking personnel or third parties, to monitor, manage, and respond to alerts about their network’s availability and performance. The service providers make us of specialised NOC tools to offer key solutions.
Some key Network Operation activities include
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- Network monitoring
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- Incident response
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- Communications Management (Email, voice, & video)
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- Performance, quality, and optimization reporting
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- Software/firmware installation, troubleshooting, and updating of network elements
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- Patch management
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- Backup and storage
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- Firewall management
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- Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and other security tool deployment and monitoring, in collaboration with Security Operations
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- Threat analysis and blast radius analysis in collaboration with Security Operations
What are some ways in which a NOC can affect your business? Like any operation, NOC has its own set of pros and cons.
Potential benefits of a NOC
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- 24/7 performance monitoring of your remote sites
Your network operations centre plays an important role in ensuring high availability and performance. A NOC’s job is to keep your network infrastructure stable and secure by continually monitoring and maintaining it. A professional and well-equipped NOC may make or break a remote monitoring system’s performance.
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- Help you concentrate solely on your tasks
You can concentrate on your other responsibilities if you have a NOC monitoring your remote network equipment. When it comes to dealing with alerts at your distant sites, this can increase productivity, enhance reaction times, and provide pre-emptive measures.
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- Makes alerts less overwhelming
If you have a big network, the inundation of alerts might be overwhelming for a single individual or a small group. This difficulty can be solved by having a NOC with employees accessible 24/7. Another effective approach to address this problem is to use an alarm master with nuisance alarm filtering capabilities.
On the other hand, there are two primary drawbacks of establishing a Network Operations Centre.
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- Financial factors
When it comes to tools, processes, and employees, NOC expenses may quickly escalate. Monitoring equipment must be refreshed when newer technologies become available to ensure the best possible visibility of your distant sites. This necessitates ongoing training of specialists in the abilities required to comprehend and operate these systems. Setting up and running an effective NOC for a small or medium business may be a costly and difficult process.
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- Outside of Business Hours
While many NOCs are open 24/7, this is not always the case. Some businesses are in the phase of transition. Their network may be large enough to support the creation of a NOC center, but they can’t yet justify the cost of manning it outside of regular or perhaps extended business hours. To resolve this, you can make use of monitoring devices that can send on-call technicians after-hours alert notifications.
To overcome these challenges, it is good to look at some NOC best practices:
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- Monitoring a wide range of information and network systems, such as communications circuits, cloud resources, LAN/WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls, VoIP systems, and application delivery.
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- Responding to all occurrences, outages, and performance concerns in a timely manner.
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- Organizing concerns into categories for escalation to the appropriate technical teams.
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- Recognize, identify, and prioritize issues based on the customer’s business needs, organizational policies, and operational effects.
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- Obtaining and assessing performance reports for various systems, as well as reporting performance patterns to senior technical employees to assist them in predicting potential difficulties or outages.
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- Documenting all activities in compliance with business rules and procedures.
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- Performing basic system testing and operational duties. (installation of patches, network connectivity testing, script execution, etc.).
Network operations teams will need to guarantee that internal and external networks and services do not stifle application availability, but rather speed it up.
Skillmine Technology Consulting is one of the best NOC Services Providers to partner with. Contact us to learn more.
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