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Today’s IT organizations face incredible challenges. Customers, both internal and external, demand 24×7 uptime and availability. There are constant security threats, audit and certification requirements, cloud migrations, patching, upgrades, and more projects than hours in the day or dollars in the budget. IT departments are stretched to the limit, trying to offer 24×7 support with a 9-to-5 staff. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone.
If you’re looking to deliver more value to your organization without breaking the bank and hiring additional staff, you might consider partnering with an outsourced NOC services provider. Here are eight benefits you should expect from a NOC partner:
1 — 24×7 Coverage
Your network infrastructure is a complex and evolving set of interconnected platforms. Automated monitoring platforms simply cannot compare to having an actual engineer’s eyes on your network. To offer 24×7 coverage internally, you’d need at least seven dedicated engineers on staff. We’re not talking about an on-call solution, but actual engineers keeping an eye on things days, nights, weekends, and holidays. Doing so, however, is both expensive and inefficient.
A NOC partner should bring both value and efficiency to your operations with dedicated, skilled staff available to monitor your networks and alert you to outages and impairments. More experienced NOC partners should also offer remediation of outages, insights, and expertise.
2 — Advanced Expertise
You are likely an expert in many areas of IT, whether networking, server administration, database administration, applications, e-commerce, or some other specialty. A Network Operations Center must transcend these other areas to provide an integrated “single pane of glass” view into the health and operation of those critical systems. To do so, however, requires a different kind of expertise.
A background in network operations is key, but a NOC partner should also be expert in monitoring methodologies like SNMP, WMI, JSON, XML, Syslog, and other related protocols. They should be able to provide trend analysis and insight to provide proactive alerts, the ability to develop custom checks and balances, a way to silence alerts during maintenance windows, and the capability to specify a class of service to make sure the right people, at the right time, are alerted to problems. Experience leads to expertise, which ultimately manifests itself as focus.
3 — Focus
There are many components that are involved in providing reliable service to your customers—from network equipment and servers to the applications running on them. Unless you’re a NOC services provider yourself, it’s likely that infrastructure monitoring is less of a focus and more of an afterthought. That’s not an accusation, as much as an observation. For your NOC partner that is not the case. Monitoring and reliable service is their only focus, it’s what they do. Taking what may be an afterthought to a high-level focus to improve reliability and customer service will benefit both your IT staff and your customer satisfaction.
4 — Customized, Flexible Monitoring Solutions
Do you have critical processes that run every night? What happens if they don’t complete? Certain critical functions or devices cannot be properly monitored with standard off-the-shelf monitoring systems. These functions require custom scripts to properly detect a failure or impairment. NOC partners have the expertise and focus to develop custom scripts that take into account the unique requirements of your business. A NOC service partner can build scripts that check for completion of your critical processes at the appropriate time to determine if your functions succeeded. Alerting you of an issue within minutes of the failure allows your business to correct the issue before it affects your customers.
You may have a web application that you need to exercise to fully determine its availability. NOC partners can develop synthetic transactions that are capable of fully testing your websites and alert you if your sites are malfunctioning in any way. These types of tests can be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with off-the-shelf solutions. Fully testing your sites gives you the certainty that your customers are able to utilize all aspects of your web applications at all times.
5 — Eliminating Noise
Out-of-the-box monitoring solutions may seem easy, but what happens when the number of alarms being sent becomes overwhelming? The answer to that is simple. The alarms are ignored and outages are missed! Your NOC services partner can “dial down” the alarms to what is truly important so your staff does not become desensitized. Your NOC partner can go even further by setting up custom classes of service (COS) to only alert you when you need to be informed. Along with COS, your NOC partner can also verify whether the alarm is valid and ongoing, before notifying your IT staff. With all of these capabilities in place, your IT staff will not be distracted with false alarms. More importantly, they won’t miss the real ones.
6 — Eliminating Busy Work
Your computing environment is constantly changing and evolving. New equipment is added, networks are changed, and new websites are launched. All of these changes are good for your business and these changes need to be monitored. But who is updating your monitoring system? If it is your staff, what are they not doing while they are maintaining the monitoring system? There is always an opportunity cost. NOC services partners will keep their monitoring system up to date, freeing your staff from this busy work and allowing them to focus on the activities that generate value for your organization.
Often monitoring a new device or application is more involved than just adding an IP address and checking a few boxes on a webpage. It can involve researching how best to monitor the device. Does it support SNMP? Does it offer a REST API? What metrics should be gathered? Which ones can be ignored? What thresholds should be set? NOC services providers are experienced working with a wide variety of devices and applications. They have experts that can spend the time researching and determining which critical metrics are important, and developers to implement them. This allows your staff to focus on projects important to your business instead of developing expertise in how to monitor it.
7 — Added Value
A top-tier NOC partner operates as an extension of your staff, providing value to your organization by minimizing outages in your network and decreasing the mean time to repair (MTTR). You can expect increased uptime of your network and more staff hours dedicated to other projects, as their time will no longer be spent on the care and feeding of a monitoring platform. Your NOC partner will maintain the monitoring platform 24×7, keep eyes on your network around the clock, and allow you to leverage their expertise for a fraction of the cost of monitoring in-house.
8 — Peace of Mind
The ultimate benefit of partnering with a NOC services provider is peace of mind. Knowing your network is under constant watch by a highly skilled NOC is invaluable. No matter what time of day or day of the week, you can expect your NOC partner to be on duty, focusing on your network, and responding to all alerts. No more missed alerts while someone sleeps through a page or misses an email. Can it get any better? Yes it can! It’s nice to be alerted of an outage in your network at two in the morning, but it’s GREAT to sleep through it and find out the next morning your NOC partner fixed the issue, following a specific set of steps that you want followed, while you had a good night’s rest.
Why Your Organization Needs NOC as a Service The NOC as a Service support model assists enterprises and broadband service providers (BSPs) in eliminating the overall operational costs and complexities of establishing and maintaining a 24x7 Network Operations Center (NOC). By doing so, the organization can better allocate their resources to projects that generate more revenue or value to the organization. For reference, the Software as a Service (SaaS) model commonly refers to a method of software delivery and licensing in which software is accessed centrally online via a subscription, rather than being bought and installed on individual computers. By contrast, NOC as a Service (NOCaaS) is commonly used to describe one of two situations: 1) Outsourced NOC services (hiring third-party NOC service providers); and 2) a managed service. We'll dive into the differences between the two a bit later in this article. What are Outsourced NOC Services? A Network Operations Center (NOC) handles problems related to managing, proactively monitoring, and controlling the systems within your IT infrastructure. That includes your network devices, servers, applications, websites and databases. These IT assets are the backbone of your organization and an Outsourced NOC ensures your systems are always available and operational for your employees and customers. When your network, website, servers, or applications go down or experience an impairment, the NOC is responsible for identifying the source of the problem, and getting everything fully functional again. The NOC is not only making sure your IT systems stay up and running, they're also optimizing network infrastructure, developing methods to better detect outages and devising methods to restore system operations quickly and efficiently. A NOC monitors the health and availability of your organization's networks, routers and switches, servers, applications, websites, firewalls ,VPN tunnels, wireless access points, and power and facility systems. Other functions of the NOC may include network performance reporting and improvement recommendations, outage response, capacity planning, phone-based alerting following defined escalation procedures, and facilitating communications between departments, partners, vendors and other stakeholders. An Outsourced NOC Services provider like iGLASS Networks, offers all of these benefits as a service to their customers. Their services are very focused on the availability and operability of your IT infrastructure and applications. This is typically their sole area of focus. How is this different from Managed Services? Managed services usually refer to a simplified and standardized set of services to manage devices, computers, applications, and other infrastructure components of an organization. They tend not to be focused on a single function and are often offered by Managed Service Providers (MSPs). An MSP may offer you any number of services, including design and engineering, help desk, technical support, support of back office applications, cybersecurity services, PEN testing, and hosted software licenses for platforms like Office365 or Salesforce. Many MSPs also offer equipment and software sales, and localized installation and support. While some MSPs offer NOC Services, often these services are limited to what their chosen software platform supports, with limited customization or subject matter expertise. This tends not to be the best solution for organizations looking for a more comprehensive, flexible and customized NOC solution, but can be more cost effective than standing up an internal NOC team. Internal NOC Team vs. Outsourced NOC Service Provider As iGLASS details in their " Beginner's Guide to Outsourced NOC Monitoring Services ," Network Operations Centers need at least two people working at all times. When you add in a NOC Manager, that works out to a staff of at least eleven people for 24x7 coverage. While the salary of NOC technicians varies depending on experience and geographic location, the national average salary of an in-house NOC technician is around $70,000, with managers earning around $80,000. In salaries alone, this becomes a $780,000 annual operating expense, or $65,000 a month (not including benefits). An organization must also consider the necessary hardware and software needed. Enterprise IT networks often consist of hundreds of pieces of equipment. Collectively, the cost of staffing, providing hardware, software, and the housing of the actual NOC center in an appropriate facility to protect the equipment (with proper cooling, power redundancy, immediate fire suppression, etc.) can easily cost an organization hundreds of thousands, to millions of dollars annually. Since maintaining an internal team can be extremely expensive, working with an Outsourced NOC Service Provider is often the best decision for organizations looking to maximize the value derived from their limited IT resources. While MSPs usually offer limited options, some Outsourced NOC Service Providers offer turn-key solutions, with low up-front investments, necessary monitoring hardware and software, a trouble-ticketing platform, and human-driven alerts and escalations by phone (not just emails or SMS messages). These providers usually include platform maintenance and upgrades, and 24x7 monitoring plans can start as low as $3,000 per month for 100 infrastructure assets. To learn more about outsourcing NOC services and how they compare to SOC services, please check out our recent blog, " NOC vs. SOC: Comparing Outsourced Services ." For more insights and assistance, get in touch with our team .
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