If you’re in the IT or telecommunications industry, you’ve most likely heard of the term Network Operations Center, or NOC, before. But what exactly does a NOC do? A NOC helps an organization to monitor and control its networks and other IT assets to keep them secure and reliable and up to speed with network demands. If you want to know more about what a NOC does, keep reading!
Network Monitoring
How do you ensure that your business’s network is functioning correctly? The best way to ensure network health and performance is by monitoring it. The term monitoring can seem nebulous at first. What does it mean to monitor your network? In simple terms, it means keeping track of its performance and alerting users when there’s a problem.
A good monitoring system has well-defined processes for identifying specific issues, a quick mechanism for notifying an IT operations staff member or security officer, and most importantly–the ability to handle large amounts of data so that engineers are presented with real-time information about problems on their networks.
Crisis Management
Keeping track of traffic—inbound and outbound—is central to NOC operations. After all, Internet traffic must flow smoothly without interruption if an organization wants to do business effectively. Any sort of disruption in service can impact that ability, which can have serious consequences. No amount of planning will predict every possible disruption, but NOC personnel should be prepared to react quickly and efficiently if any problems occur.
This includes being familiar with customer backup plans and outage procedures; creating scripts to deal with routine scenarios; and building relationships with third-party providers who might provide assistance during emergencies. Being proactive about crisis management is just as important as knowing how to respond once problems occur.
Security Information and Event Management
An overview of SIEM systems and how they can help an organization detect, identify, and respond to cybersecurity threats. You’ll learn about various technologies that are used in SIEMs, such as log correlation engines, antivirus products, intrusion detection systems, security information management solutions and more.
You will also learn about how to manage alerts from different sources within your organization. In addition to reading our post on SIEMs here on The Open Group Connections site, check out our Securing IT Infrastructure webinar for more details!
Change Management
An integral part of any NOC is ensuring that changes are performed correctly and safely, which requires business and technology alignment. Let’s say you need to add an additional firewall to your network. Without change management, you might be able to perform that task in 20 minutes—but if you don’t ensure that it will work with all other firewalls on your network, or that it won’t violate any business policies, then change management will help solve problems before they cause outages or even lost revenue. Change management helps ensure that future changes are safe so you can execute them with speed and confidence.
Business Continuity Management
A network operations center (NOC) is a physical or virtual location where real-time monitoring and management of computing resources takes place. The main role of an NOC is to make sure that business functions are performed efficiently and effectively. The NOC environment must enable employees to quickly bring processes back online after they’ve been affected by an outage or disruption, either man-made or due to nature.
At its most basic level, an NOC exists to monitor and maintain everything that goes on inside an organization’s IT infrastructure—making sure things run smoothly and providing assistance when they don’t. That also means ensuring network uptime for day-to-day activities like payroll, accounting and customer service.
Web Infrastructure Management
The main purpose of a NOC is to monitor networks and their core infrastructures in order to reduce risk and ensure that traffic flowing through them remains uninterrupted. At its most basic level, a NOC monitors performance indicators such as packet loss, jitter, etc., which are provided by network probes. If these values exceed certain thresholds, then there may be an issue on the network.
If so, than it’s up to NOC staff members to resolve it immediately in order to avoid service outages or performance issues for clients dependent on those resources. To do so involves taking manual control over affected routers and switches. In some cases, they can also configure failover mechanisms in such a way that if one device goes down, another will immediately take its place.
End User Support
NOCs exist to support your network’s end users. The days when NOCs focused primarily on supporting IT staff have long since passed, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore your internal customers entirely. Supporting end users also means providing them with answers to their questions, solutions to their problems and help accessing available resources – as well as providing physical facilities and logistics for accessing those resources. And it’s not just about solving problems: It’s also about helping employees connect with each other more easily by fostering collaboration both within an organization and between different departments.
Cloud Infrastructure Maintenance
In today’s business environment, downtime is not an option. Unfortunately, there are situations that will cause your cloud applications to experience problems. Therefore, it’s crucial that you have a well-managed NOC staff in place to take immediate action when these problems arise.
For example, your NOC staff should be monitoring: Server load and disk space usage; performance statistics for each server in your network; and network statistics such as packet loss and throughput measurements. Your NOC may also need to perform backups or deploy software updates at times. If you want to avoid issues with cloud infrastructure maintenance, it’s best to create clear procedures for what happens when something does go wrong—and how quickly your team should respond.
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Conclusion
A Network Operations Center (NOC) refers to an organization’s command center for managing, configuring, and troubleshooting network elements. This can be done through physical or virtual NOCs. The main goal of a NOC is to monitor network performance and respond to problems immediately.
A successful NOC needs dedicated staff who have both strong technical knowledge and great communication skills. Because today’s networks are both distributed and diverse, with high availability requirements, as well as highly regulated environments, it has become increasingly critical that organizations have centralized support teams on standby 24/7/365 ready to respond at a moment’s notice.
