Blog - iGLASS Networks

Twin Valley Case Study

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:19:20 GMT

When Twin Valley discovered the iGLASS NOC Service at a recent trade show, the benefits were immediately apparent. They couldn't wait to gain single-pane-of-glass visibility into their network's performance.

iGLASS Achieves SOC 2 Type II Recertification

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:00:00 GMT

Independent Audit Verifies iGLASS Networks’ Internal Controls and Processes

Cary, NC – iGLASS Networks, a leading provider of outsourced NOC as a Service, today announced that it has completed its SOC 2 Type II audit for 2025/2026, performed by KirkpatrickPrice . This attestation provides evidence that iGLASS Networks has a strong commitment to security and delivering high-quality services to its clients by demonstrating they have the necessary internal controls and processes in place.

A SOC 2 audit provides an independent, third-party validation that a service organization’s information security practices meet industry standards stipulated by the AICPA . During the audit, a service organization’s non-financial reporting controls as they relate to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of a system are tested. The SOC 2 report delivered by KirkpatrickPrice verifies the suitability of the design and operating effectiveness of the controls implemented by iGLASS Networks to meet the standards for these criteria.

“The SOC 2 audit is based on the Trust Services Criteria,” said Joseph Kirkpatrick, President of KirkpatrickPrice. “iGLASS Networks delivers trust-based services to their clients, and by communicating the results of this audit, their clients can be assured of their reliance on iGLASS Networks’ controls.”

About iGLASS Networks

iGLASS Networks is a high-touch, boutique provider of outsourced NOC services. From their Network Operations Center in Cary, NC, iGLASS personnel provide their customers with turn-key 24×7 monitoring, alerting, reporting and remediation of IP-based networks, servers, applications and web sites. With over 27 years of experience, iGLASS can overcome most any monitoring challenge a customer encounters. Utilizing proprietary monitoring methods and expertise, iGLASS is able to minimize false alerts and verify not just the availability of network assets, but also the proper operation of those assets.

About KirkpatrickPrice

KirkpatrickPrice is a licensed CPA firm, PCI QSA, and a HITRUST CSF Assessor, registered with the PCAOB, providing assurance services to over a thousand clients in North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. The firm has more than a decade of experience in information security by performing assessments, audits, and tests that strengthen information security practices and internal controls. KirkpatrickPrice most commonly performs assessments on SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, HITRUST CSF, GDPR, ISO 27001, FISMA, and FERPA frameworks, as well as advanced-level penetration testing. For more information, visit www.kirkpatrickprice.com , follow KirkpatrickPrice on LinkedIn , or subscribe to their YouTube channel .

ISPN’s Partnership with Align Capital Partners: Driving Broadband Innovation and Customer Success

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 14:09:10 GMT

Lenexa, Kansas – December 18, 2024 – ISPN Network Services (“ISPN” or the “Company”), a leading managed IT and customer support provider for broadband operators, has received a strategic investment from Align Capital Partners (“ACP”). ISPN primarily serves broadband fiber and internet operators in suburban and rural areas across the country. The Company’s services include premium technical support, network monitoring and managed hosting services. ISPN CEO Jeff Neblett and President & CFO Scott Lauber will continue leading the firm through its next phase of growth.

“Together with ACP, we are building a platform and services that seamlessly combine innovation, reliability, and scalability. Our mission is to empower our customers in the broadband industry to achieve their goals through best-in-class customer experiences and meaningful investments in the communities they serve—ensuring that everyone stays connected, every day, to the networks that power their lives,” said Jeff Neblett.

The investment in ISPN fits ACP’s focus on outsourcing trends within IT services, particularly in vertical end-markets where technology adoption is lagging. “I applaud Jeff and Scott for recognizing early on that ISPN had the right building blocks to support several dynamic trends happening within rural broadband,” said ACP Partner Matt Iodice. “ISPN is uniquely positioned to help clients navigate the complexities of technical support by pairing talented industry professionals with unique client-facing technology,” said ACP Partner Matt Iodice.

“This partnership underscores our commitment to innovation and growth,” added Scott Lauber. “With ACP’s support, we are poised to expand our reach and build on our reputation as a trusted partner in managed technology services.”

Through the collaboration, ISPN will strengthen its current offerings and pursue strategic add-on acquisitions, similar to the Company’s 2023 acquisition of iGLASS Networks, to broaden its capabilities and meet growing customer demands.

ABOUT ISPN NETWORK SERVICES

Founded in 1994, ISPN helps leaders of community-focused broadband service providers elevate the customer experience and achieve growth through customer-driven, reliable and innovative 24×7 support and managed IT solutions. By utilizing ISPN’s vertically focused technical support, network operations center services and email hosting, broadband fiber organizations can achieve economies of scale through the Company’s resources and expertise. For more information, visit ispn.net.

ABOUT ALIGN CAPITAL PARTNERS

Align Capital Partners is a growth-oriented private equity firm that partners with business owners and management teams to create shared success. ACP manages $1.7 billion in committed capital with investment teams in Cleveland and Dallas. ACP brings experience and resources to help lower-middle market companies accelerate their growth, to the benefit of management, employees and the firm’s investors. ACP makes control investments in differentiated companies within the business services, technology, specialty manufacturing and distribution sectors. For more information, visit aligncp.com.

Lumos launches Outsourced NOC in Record Time with iGLASS

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Fri, 31 May 2024 15:28:49 GMT

When the need arose to establish a new Network Operations Center ("NOC"), Lumos Fiber partnered with iGLASS Networks to get things done in record time, with incredible results.

How NOC Partnerships Help Credit Unions Overcome IT Challenges

Wed, 29 May 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Banking hours used to be 9 to 5, but like many services today, customers these days expect credit unions to offer 24×7 availability and systems that work reliably and efficiently. Think about it. Unless you work there, when was the last time you actually visited your credit union in person? These days, and especially with our newer generations of consumers, everything is online.

The core infrastructure powering today's banking systems have gotten progressively more complex. While some environments, like cloud computing, have offered greater efficiencies and security, the biggest challenge for most IT executives is multiple projects and priorities competing for increasingly limited IT resources. Systems have become ever ever more dependent on the networks and IT infrastructure that power the banking business, yet internal subject matter expertise (and hours in the day) are limited. As a result, roughly 80% of all credit unions use targeted outsourcing as a key tactic to meet the challenge of keeping customers connected and staying competitive with the big banks.

Some of the most valuable providers of outsourced technical services are SaaS-based Network Operations Centers (NOCs). Through their advanced monitoring capabilities, outsourced NOC providers help credit unions bridge the gap between the demands placed upon IT personnel and the resources available to meet them. The following are some examples of how NOC partnerships go beyond routine network monitoring to help credit unions overcome IT challenges:

Validating Automated Banking Applications Around the Clock

Online banking must be up and running 24×7. A NOC partner can monitor your systems around the clock, always on the lookout for failed logins, failed transactions or latency. NOC partners use synthetic transactions to put core credit union applications through their paces, validating not only the Availability of those applications, but also their Operability. NOC Partner notification procedures are also flexible and customizable to suit your needs and accommodate 24/7, on-call and after hours requirements.

Battling ATM Skimmers

NOC providers can also provide protections again ATM skimming . The NOC can integrate with ATM vendors like Diebold, so when skimming alerts are generated, someone is actually listening for them, and expediting the process of notifying those who need to respond. That faster response has tremendous benefits in limiting liability and mitigating further losses.

Monitoring Automated Nightly Closeout Jobs/Processes

Nightly closeout process typically run pretty reliably; that is, until they don’t — in which case, someone has to do something. That “something” could be the difference between opening for business the next day or declaring an unwanted credit union holiday. Some credit unions choose to monitor those processes via simple email alerts, or perhaps having an on-call engineer logging in each night. Emails get missed and engineers have better things to do.

NOC partners can go far beyond in-house capabilities and automate that monitoring. It involves an integrated set of polling methodologies, from synthetic transactions to SQL queries and log file monitoring, which monitor the jobs from start to finish. If any segment of the job fails to complete, is delayed, or only partially completed, the NOC can immediately take action and notify you. Many NOCs can also go a step further, logging into those servers and restarting the failed jobs, to ensure faster remediation and resolutions.

Partner with a NOC that Provides Expertise Beyond Your In-House Assets

At the root of automated banking processes is the application of in-depth IT expertise and technical acumen. Everything discussed above is part of that big picture of skills and experience a customized NOC monitoring partner brings to credit union clients. Our blog post, “ 8 Benefits of Partnering with a NOC Services Provider ,” has eight important criteria you should consider before outsourcing your network monitoring.

Benefits of Choosing NOC as a Service

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 14:20:31 GMT

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 .

NOC vs. SOC: Comparing Outsourced Services

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:00:00 GMT

NOC vs. SOC:
Comparing Outsourced Services

Success in today's ever-changing business landscape means having the necessary resources available to navigate issues both within and outside of your organization. It is paramount that companies ensure that they are not exposing the personal data that customers entrust to them to potential outside security incidents.

Protecting these assets requires taking a multi-layered approach to data security. Staying ahead of the ever-evolving techniques used by cyber hackers means ensuring that each vulnerable point which might end up being exploited is accounted for and protected.

Establishing an internal Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) to handle these challenges is one option. However, creating internal teams for these efforts is not always the best choice for your organization.

Outsourcing these services empowers your employees to focus on the functions of your core business, while simultaneously allowing experts in the space to use their network monitoring skills to handle any issues that may arise.

Protecting Network Infrastructure

Workers expect to have functional equipment and infrastructure to complete their tasks without corporate network and business disruptions. Any problems need to be resolved quickly to avoid impacting customers and harming the reputation of the company.

You may simply be wondering: What is the difference between a NOC and a SOC? The Network Operations Center's (NOC) main responsibility is to ensure that the organization's network infrastructure is capable of sustaining business operations, while the Security Operations Center's (SOC) main responsibility is to protect the organization against cyber security threats that have the potential to disrupt said business operations.

What is a Network Operations Center (NOC)?

A Network Operations Center (NOC) handles problems related to managing, monitoring, and controlling the networks within your infrastructure. That includes your networking assets, servers, virtual machines, and databases. These items keep data flowing to the applications used by your employees and customers.

When your network, website, servers, or applications go down, the NOC is responsible for identifying the source of the problem, and making everything functional again. The NOC is not only making sure your IT systems stay up and running, they're also optimizing network infrastructure.

A NOC monitors the health and availability of your:

Networks
Routers and Switches
Servers
Applications
Websites
Firewalls
VPN Tunnels
Wireless Access Points
LANs/WANs/MANs
Power and facility systems

Other functions of the NOC include:

Network performance reporting and improvement recommendations
Outage Response
Capacity planning
Alerting according to defined escalation procedures
Ensuring coordination between disparate networks

Why Outsourcing your NOC Makes Sense

Having an outsourced NOC team in place to monitor and resolve problems before they present themselves to end users can be the best option to minimize downtime.

NOC’s usually have one central control room, which oversees any potential complications which can threaten the integrity of an organization's infrastructure, and alerts the organization about any interruptions when necessary.

As iGLASS details in their " Guide to Outsourced NOC Monitoring Services ," there are many advantages to outsourcing NOC services.

These advantages include:

Your network will experience far less downtime. The experts on station detect anomalies before they become crippling outages.
When outages do occur, they are addressed immediately, and around the clock.
Your operational costs in terms of people, time, and resources will be lower and predictable.
Your IT support and network staff are freed to do more mission-critical support needed to meet your project, business efficiency, and growth goals.
An experienced NOC team will minimize the nuisance alerts which distract your staff today.
An outsourced NOC partner brings a fresh perspective. Your NOC partner has eyes on your infrastructure 24×7 with the expertise and experience to monitor your systems in ways you may not have considered.

What is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?

A Security Operations Center is the team within an organization that is responsible for detecting, preventing, investigating, and responding to any and all cyber threats. SOC teams perform 24/7/365 network monitoring for an organization, and address potential threats to sensitive data, corporate IT assets, computing systems, and other digital resources belonging to the organization.

If a cyberattack is detected, the SOC analysts are responsible for taking the necessary steps to remediate it. A SOC within an organization's building or facility is generally a central location from which staff can supervise the site using data processing technology.

The managing and enhancing of an organization's security posture can be divided into three silos: people, processes, and technology. Governance and compliance are vital to ensure all teams within the organization are doing their part to protect sensitive assets.

Responsibility of Security Operations Centers

With the constantly increasing threat of cyberattacks, a SOC (in some cases referred to as a Security Operation Center) is crucial to the success of an organization. They ensure the organization's ability to sustain operations, remain profitable, and achieve and maintain compliance with all regulations that apply in a given industry.

Though they are essential, achieving a high level of security maturity via an in-house SOC can be extremely expensive and time consuming.

For this reason, many organizations opt to use outsourced security services, such as SOC-as-a-Service offerings. These agreements are generally laid out in Service Level Agreements (SLA), which represents the commitment by the SOC to perform specific tasks - for example investigation and remediation of specific cases - within an accepted duration of time.

For more insights and assistance, get in touch with our team.

Boosting Business Success: Outsourcing Your NOC and Network Monitoring

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:52:43 GMT

NOC Monitoring as a Service

In today's fast-paced digital world, a well-functioning network infrastructure is crucial. Managing it requires a Network Operations Center (NOC) to monitor, manage, and maintain operations. But maintaining an in-house NOC can be demanding and costly. That's where outsourcing to experts like iGLASS Networks can make all the difference. In this article, we'll explore the benefits of outsourcing these critical functions.

The Purpose of a Network Operations Center (NOC)

First, let's understand the primary purpose of a NOC. A Network Operations Center is the central hub responsible for:

Proactive Network Monitoring : Detecting issues before they disrupt operations.
Incident Management : Swiftly responding to network incidents.
Performance Optimization : Ensuring peak network performance.
Security Monitoring : Protecting against threats.
Data Analysis : Collecting and analyzing data for efficiency.

The Five Benefits of Outsourcing NOC and Network Monitoring

Outsourcing these functions to a trusted partner like iGLASS Networks brings several key advantages:

1. Cost Efficiency

Running an in-house NOC involves substantial costs. Outsourcing offers a cost-effective solution, paying only for necessary services while leaving the infrastructure and staffing to experts.

2. Access to Specialized Expertise

NOC outsourcing provides access to a team of skilled professionals well-versed in network monitoring and management. They employ the latest technologies and best practices for optimal network performance.

3. Enhanced Focus on Core Business Activities

Outsourcing allows your organization to focus on core activities rather than worrying about network issues. Redirect resources and attention to strategic initiatives that drive business growth.

4. 24/7 Monitoring and Rapid Incident Response

Network disruptions don't adhere to a 9-to-5 schedule. A dedicated NOC service, such as iGLASS Networks , offers round-the-clock monitoring and incident response, minimizing downtime and customer impact.

5. Scalability and Flexibility

As your business expands, your network needs grow. Outsourcing your NOC and network monitoring provides scalability and flexibility to accommodate changes without the hassle of hiring and training additional staff.

The Role of NOC Monitoring

NOC monitoring is the backbone of efficient network management. It includes real-time tracking of network elements, applications, and devices, with key functions such as proactive alerting, performance analytics, security monitoring, incident management, and capacity planning.

Outsourcing: Pros and Cons

While outsourcing offers numerous benefits, it's essential to consider both sides:

Pros of Outsourcing:

Cost Savings
Access to Expertise
Focus on Core Activities
24/7 Monitoring
Scalability

Cons of Outsourcing:

Loss of Direct Control
Security Concerns (addressed with trusted providers)
Potential Communication Challenges (mitigated through effective collaboration)

Services Provided by a NOC

NOCs offer a wide range of services:

Network Monitoring Service : Real-time tracking and analysis of network performance, security, and incidents.
Server Monitoring Service : Continuous monitoring and management of server health and performance.
Incident Management: Swift response and resolution of network incidents.
Performance Optimization: Fine-tuning network elements for optimal performance.
Security Monitoring: Protecting your network against threats and vulnerabilities.

In conclusion, outsourcing your NOC and network monitoring can be a strategic move for your business. It offers cost efficiency, access to expertise, and the freedom to focus on what you do best. iGLASS Networks is here to help you realize these benefits. Embrace NOC outsourcing and elevate your network's performance.

For more insights and assistance, get in touch .

Calix ConneXions 2023

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 15:42:22 GMT

Learn about our NOC & Help Desk Services for Broadband Service Providers!

Key Differences Between a Broadband Help Desk and an Outsourced NOC Service

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 11:00:00 GMT

Many people use the terms NOC and Help Desk interchangeably, but it’s important to know they’re not one and the same. Although the two often work together, there are key distinctions between the two.

Broadband Help Desk Providers Provide Support to Individual Subscribers

A help desk is a critical support system that focuses on assisting end-users with technical issues they encounter. These inquiries are typically initiated through various channels like chat, web forms, email, or phone calls. The primary aim of a help desk is to provide reactive support and promptly resolve incidents or tickets raised by users.

A broadband help desk partner offers a range of managed service tasks including:

Provisioning Modems, ONTs and Gateways
Troubleshooting Hardware and Software Issues
Assisting End-users with Malware/Virus Removal
Providing Email Configuration/Access Support
Helping with WiFi/SSID Settings
Resetting Forgotten or Expired Passwords
Providing Remote Access Support

Broadband operators have a number of help desk options available to them:

Build and Staff an Internal Help Desk : While this offers flexibility and customization, it can be costly.
Hire a Help Desk Partner : This option provides quick setup with a professional staff ready to offer support. It's especially beneficial for startups or smaller broadband operators as it can also provide cost-effective 24x7 support.
Implement a Hybrid Approach: By combining an internal help desk with a help desk partner, you can ensure support during business hours and seamless support after hours or during busy periods.

Outsourced NOC Services Partners Focus on Your Core Networks

In contrast to help desks that focus on end-users, a NOC Partner concentrates on your core networks, servers, applications and websites. Acting as a mission control center, the NOC partner monitors and manages your network's performance, availability and operability. This proactive approach aims to minimize outage duration, customer churn and dissatisfaction.

Key responsibilities of a NOC Partner include:

Monitoring critical systems and metrics behind the scenes.
Taking immediate action during impairments or outages and coordinating with your staff and vendors for restoration.
Offering remediation for issues, such as rebooting systems, opening carrier tickets, or dispatching technicians.
Resolving network issues before end-users are affected, thereby reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR), when outages occur.

An excellent NOC partner provides full transparency and visibility from the core network down to the subscriber equipment in homes and businesses. Some specific tasks that a NOC can handle include:

Turn-key Administration of the NMS (network management system).
Integrated support for disparate platforms and systems, including DOCSIS, PON, Fixed Wireless and Digital Video , eliminating the need for maintaining and accessing multiple tools.
24x7 "Eyes on Glass" with a NOC staffed by professional subject matter experts.
Access to real-time operations data via a mobile application or Internet Portal.
Remote access to the NMS from the field.

Choosing between outsourcing the NOC function or building an in-house NOC requires careful consideration all of the upfront and hidden costs associated with each. Failure to do so will expose you to the unmitigated costs associated with outages which a NOC ensures against.

If you've decided that expert expert outsourced NOC services are the way to go but are unsure where to start, our free guide to choosing a NOC partner can help. Discover what to look for, key services and features to prioritize, important questions to ask, and more!

The Top 5 Infrastructure Monitoring Challenges of Growing Organizations

Mon, 15 May 2023 11:00:00 GMT

Monitoring and ensuring network performance has easily become a full-time effort for organizations everywhere. Growing enterprises—especially those on a fast-track growth curve—have the additional task of finding monitoring solutions that can scale with that growth, and accommodate new platforms and challenges like the cloud or work-from-home requirements.

This article takes a look at five of the top issues that keep IT departments up at night as they try to watch over far-flung users, applications, cloud services , and on-premise hardware infrastructure.

Unique Monitoring Challenges Facing Enterprise Organizations

High Availability and Scalability

As new hardware, software, platforms and services are added to the network , your legacy set of monitoring tools, that served you so well last year, may no longer be sufficient to prevent downtime and performance issues. The functionality of those legacy monitoring tools often doesn’t provide insight into the newest platforms and systems.

Case in point: Today’s enterprise networks often have to support not only data but also latency-intolerant voice, phone, and video (Zoom anyone?) As a result, IT departments need to adjust their IT Service Management (ITSM) functions to accommodate a growing multitude of critical applications .

That adjustment requires monitoring tools that, ideally, offer a “single pane of glass” into the entire network and its parts. Without such tools, and left without a cohesive strategy, IT teams tend to develop their own competing, independent platforms to monitor the specific network elements for which they’re responsible. Such piecemeal approaches to network performance monitoring are inefficient and can sometimes introduce security concerns into the network. They also often don’t scale, and cannot assure the high availability users expect. Overall performance begins to suffer.

Partnering with an outsourced NOC gives you the scalability and high availability you need as your network grows. A NOC partner will stay on top of alerts to minimize false positives, and create a more stable and reliable network overall.

Geographic Distribution

Enterprises with offices spread across the nation and/or the world face another problem. Their servers, network devices, IoT devices, appliances, and personnel are spread out over vast geographies and time zones. They often connect to a variety of disparate cloud services as well. It’s not uncommon for headquarters to give remote teams the authority to manage their own local network segments, further complicating the network management landscape.

Having potentially dozens of independent monitoring teams (made worse if multiple monitoring tools are in use) makes it extremely difficult to correlate data that’s meaningful to the enterprise as a whole. What may be acceptable network performance to the team in Chicago, may be wholly unacceptable to the team in London that relies on databases hosted in Chicago.

Further, as various teams solve problems in their respective areas, their experience and knowledge may not be shared with other teams. One team chasing down a common problem may have to discover on their own the solution another team has already found.

The costs of downtime incurred trying to solve the problem, performance bottlenecks, and duplicated effort are all avoidable when an outsourced NOC partner is engaged. A NOC partner can collect and retain data in a centralized location in case there’s an interruption in network connectivity anywhere in the organization. Knowledge can be shared, downtime and duplicated effort can be avoided, and more strategic IT decisions can be made.

The Problem with Performance Monitoring Portals

IT monitoring tools all strive to give you a single view into your network. Some do, but many do not. Unless you have skilled, dedicated staff deploying these tools however, you’ll likely wind up with a lot of false-positive or “nuisance” alarms. Monitoring complex systems properly requires a specific skillset which many IT techs simply don’t have.

With thousands of systems and devices on the network, it can happen that the whole screen “turns red” with alerts. And teams faced with so many alerts can struggle to identify the root cause of performance problems and the impact they have on users.

They need more specific information and a way to prioritize the problems. Without that, the monitoring team (or management) may declare that all the alerts have equal priority. Such a decision can paralyze the efforts to resolve those issues that are truly the most serious.

A NOC partner can tailor alerts, set classes of service, implement checks and balances (aka sanity checks), and customize a monitoring portal to make team members more productive, focusing on just those systems and metrics of the critical systems they manage. This eliminates the “red screen” and lets the IT department restore the network to its proper level of performance quickly.

Customization: The Multiple Tools Problem

IT departments often look for monitoring tools that give them the ability to watch over specific aspects of network health and performance. However, that approach can lead to the use of multiple tools when new services or infrastructure are added. It is also very common for multiple teams to implement their own tools, each needing yet another “special case” monitoring tool for the task at hand. When an outage occurs, you’ll see a lot of “swivel chair” activity, where technicians consult one tool for the network elements, another for the servers and yet another for the applications. It’s painful but common.

The drive to cover every aspect of network operations can spawn a dizzying array of monitoring tools—each requiring their own unique logins and each presenting their findings in different formats. As the IT department moves to new systems, products and services, the wheel is reinvented over and over which is inefficient and expensive.

Multiple tools can also result in numerous false positive alerts , ultimately leading to "alert burnout" and apathy on the part of your personnel. An outsourced NOC solution, administered by experts, can be customized to meet the needs of a growing enterprise so that the entire network can be monitored in a consolidated fashion, and can adjust as new technology, devices, and services are added.

The Reporting Problem

Enterprise organizations, especially those in a high-growth market, need advanced reporting capabilities to provide a broader and deeper view into network performance. KPIs and metrics that form the basis for SLAs need to be tracked on a regular basis to expose trends and allow analysis that provides a true understanding of their network’s health, performance and growth over time.

A NOC partner can report on such trends and provide the analysis that gives you a true understanding of your complete enterprise network, no matter how large and geographically diverse it may be.

iGLASS monitoring solutions are developed with the specialized requirements of our clients in mind. Contact us to see how we can provide a flexible and scalable IT performance monitoring solution that addresses all the issues your growing organization faces.

How Remote Network Monitoring Solutions Benefit Organizations With Multiple Locations

Tue, 02 May 2023 16:18:00 GMT

Multi-site organizations across all industries face similar challenges when it comes to managing and supporting their IT operations. Often the growth within these organizations has outpaced that of the IT teams responsible for supporting them.

When you add in the complexities introduced by today’s dynamic IT environments , virtualization, cloud computing, Wi-Fi and IP telephony (just to name a few), supporting remote sites and users with limited IT staff can be a daunting endeavor.

Challenges Faced in a Multi-site Environment

Reliable Network Connectivity is the lifeblood of every organization, especially those with remote locations. If employees and customers cannot rely on the underlying network, your business will suffer, morale will decline and customers will bolt for your nearest competitor. Here are just some of the challenges related to network connectivity as they apply to remote locations:

The Benefits of Outsourced Network Monitoring

The beauty of partnering with an outsourced NOC partner is that they offer the solutions to the challenges listed above without distracting, overworking or overwhelming your valuable internal IT resources. The key benefits of outsourced network monitoring include :

1. Expertise and Experience

Outsourced network monitoring partners offer expertise and experience across multiple hardware platforms and carriers. They can offer recommendations based upon best practices learned from other organizations to help you organize and standardize operating procedures.

2. Support is Available 24×7

Outsourced network monitoring partners offer the 24×7 support that internal teams cannot, or do not want to, provide. This around-the-clock support is provided without the on-call headaches, vacations, sick leave, attrition and other challenges faced with providing this level of support with an internal team.

3. Proactive Detection & Remediation

Outsourced network monitoring solutions have the ability to collect real-time network connectivity and performance data for all remote locations. Through real-time data analysis, organizations can significantly reduce downtime by detecting network impairments, like packet loss or errors, and quickly implementing needed resolutions.

4. Monitoring Critical Infrastructure & Applications

As mentioned earlier, today’s network is often distributed, with critical applications hosted in a data center and in the cloud. Outsourced network monitoring partners monitor not just the network linking you and your remote locations together, but also the infrastructure and applications running in your data centers, the cloud , virtual and hybrid environments. In the event an application becomes unavailable or impaired, they can take immediate action to address the problem, ensuring your employees and customers can conduct business 24×7.

5. Empowering Your IT Resources for Maximum Value

Your IT staff may very likely be highly skilled (and stretched pretty thin). An outsourced network monitoring partner can provide relief from the difficult and time-consuming job of monitoring the performance of your IT infrastructure, freeing your staff to focus on the higher value (and more interesting) projects to grow your business and guarantee your success.

6. Fast and Efficient Deployment

An outsourced network monitoring partner offers the tools and onboarding experience to have your monitoring up and running quickly and efficiently.

Regain Control of Your Remote Business Locations

Whether a banking branch , professional office, or manufacturing facility, remote business locations offer a common set of monitoring challenges, but you don’t have to face them alone. With the help of a trusted outsourced network monitoring partner, like iGLASS, you can rest easy knowing that your remote locations are in good hands. To learn more about our industry-leading outsourced network monitoring solutions, contact iGLASS today .

Tuning Out Apathy to False Alerts

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 18:42:06 GMT

Tuning out Apathy to False Alerts

A recent IT director approached us to see if we would serve as their NOC partner, taking over responding to alerts from their internally managed NMS software. When we asked them for the reason behind their interest, they responded with one word: Apathy . Their NMS was generating volumes of alerts, at all hours of the day and night, and their staff had simply grown Apathetic to them. So many of the alerts were nuisance alerts, requiring no action on their part, they had simply grown conditioned to ignore them. Some of their staff even set up filters to automatically archive or delete the alert messages. They’d recently suffered an outage, and surprise(!) no one noticed the Actionable alerts. So much for internally managed.. . In any event, they were looking for a partner who could respond to those alerts instead of relying on their own staff to do so. That might be funny if it weren’t so common a request.

Accept alerts from a noisy NMS? No, we will not do that. In fact, we’d do a worse job in their environment than they would. Why? Because we wouldn’t have the luxury of actually knowing which alerts were actionable and which were noise, so we would have to respond to All of the alerts. That serves no one’s best interests and we learned long ago it’s no way to monitor or manage a network. We do, however, offer a better solution.

Over the last 2 decades, we’ve developed our own NMS which offers highly flexible tuning options. We tune our monitoring to filter out the noise and alert on actionable outages and impairments. We do this in a number of ways, including establishing a class of service per device, throttling thresholds, and putting automatic delays on metrics. For example, we might create a class of service that alerts only during business hours on weekdays, or suspend alerting in advance of scheduled maintenance windows. We might also create a threshold that alerts only when X number of alerts occur within Y minutes or across Z consecutive polling cycles. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of detecting outage patterns that point to external factors like overnight batch jobs, backups, a bad card or cable, or perhaps the overnight cleaning crew. We could tell you some stories.

Tuning requires a specific skillset and expertise which your staff may or may not possess. In any event, this specific prospect said they had tried to tune their NMS but considered it a “heavy lift” and an ongoing headache no one had time to focus on. Hence the resulting Apathy. This is in no way uncommon, and we hear that a lot from people.

iGLASS includes ongoing tuning as an integral part of our NOC as a Service (“NOCaaS”). Our staff has the skillset, expertise and focus to do the heavy lifting to bring peace of mind and world class monitoring to your organization and stakeholders. With expert tuning, we tune out Apathy in favor of 24x7 Action .

iGLASS Networks Joins the ISPN Family

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 19:39:19 GMT

iGLASS Networks Joins the ISPN Family: Bringing 24x7 NOC Service to the ISPN Solutions Toolkit

We are excited to announce that iGLASS Networks has been acquired by the parent company of ISPN Network Services, a leading provider of managed network services, customer support, helpdesk, and IT services for Broadband and Internet Service Providers nationwide! With this acquisition, iGLASS customers now have access to a broader range of expert solutions for their network monitoring needs.

Customers can expect to see the same great service they’ve come to know and love from iGLASS over the years, as all staff and operations are remaining in place in Cary, NC. In addition to broadband service providers, iGLASS offers NOC Services to enterprise IT, financial and healthcare organizations nationwide.

ISPN has a proven track record of delivering high-quality services to telcos, electric cooperatives, municipalities, cable operators, WISPs, and MDUs across the country – with the ability to branch into other industries as well. We are thrilled to join forces with ISPN and look forward to continuing to serve our customers with even greater capabilities and resources.

For more information on the acquisition and our expanded service offerings, please read the full press release here and visit ISPN's website .

The Real Cost of DIY Network Monitoring

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 11:00:00 GMT

For many in-house IT departments, it can be incredibly tempting to create a DIY IT infrastructure monitoring solution. The truth is, a DIY monitoring solution isn’t usually formally planned and implemented—instead, it usually starts in one department, monitoring one set of equipment or applications, and then slowly evolves as your business requirements dictate. It is usually the responsibility of a small number of people (if not one person) and consumes an out-sized portion of their (highly valuable) time.

In many organizations, the monitoring tools deployed will differ from one department to the next, with different individuals responsible for each. When an outage occurs, no one really knows where to look for resolution. What initially started as a well-intentioned project to implement a solution to monitor your IT infratructure can quickly turn into a constraint on your organization, due to growth and complexity in your network. Whether you’re trying to save on budget or wanting to recapture and optimize your internal resources , what’s the real cost of building and maintaining an IT monitoring solution at scale?

The cost of hardware, software, and recurring software maintenance is just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to the real cost of DIY IT Infrastructure monitoring, there’s so much more to consider, including:

On-call Burnout

A lot of DIY solutions rely on having staff members on-call to respond to alerts after-hours. Which sounds great on paper, but on-call solutions come with slow response times, poor performance from groggy engineers the next day, and a poor work/life balance for your employees. Doing an on-call rotation affects more than just your employee’s free time—it impacts their family too. Many engineers also wind up with more than just one night on-call—it could be three or four nights, or even up to a week or more before they can hand it off to the next person, thereby multiplying the negative effects with each day. This is an avoidable source of job dissatisfaction.

In order to avoid on-call burnout and provide coverage for true 24×7 monitoring , you would need to dedicate at least seven employees. That’s an added cost of not just wages, but benefits, equipment, training, and more. An outsourced monitoring services partner keeps an eye on your network 24×7 for a fraction of the cost to do it yourself. With a monitoring services partner, your employees don’t get burnt out and can focus on value-adding projects every day without feeling worn out from nights, weekends, and holidays responding to alerts.

Alert Fatigue

DIY monitoring solutions can generate a lot of nuisance alarms. These are alarms which alert and clear without needing to be addressed, or are very low priority and don’t require immediate attention. And it’s never just one alert at a time—it’s 30 alerts coming in because 30 devices are connected to common circuit or switch.

If your staff is continuously pestered with alarms that don’t need to be immediately dealt with, they could become indifferent or apathetic to them. They’ll learn to start ignoring them and go on about their other work duties or personal activities. This means the likelihood an engineer could miss an actionable alarm goes up significantly.

If your staff is required to respond to every alert, it can take a real toll. When an engineer keeps getting up throughout the night to respond to mostly false alerts, they’re not getting the sleep they need to be at peak performance. By the time they are on their third night of their on-call rotation, they could easily sleep through alerts—the pager/smartphone going off and nobody awake to hear it.

Outsourcing your monitoring to a partner that specializes in custom solutions will offer you features to eliminate false alerts and reduce the noise—something you simply don’t get with DIY or out-of-the-box monitoring software or solutions. For example, your NOC partner can put a delay on alerts or apply a time-based threshold to reduce the number of false positive alerts. A NOC partner can take it one step further and work with you to root out the causes of false alerts and fix them, rather than just masking them.

Skills & Training Investment

Your engineers are probably capable of setting up and running an out-of-the-box monitoring software platform without much trouble. But that responsibility typically falls on one person or a small team, so even though your network is in capable hands, it becomes a specialized skill set to keep up with updates and continually tweak the software to satisfy your needs. That specialization comes at a price.

Since only a select number of people in your organization will be well-versed on the solution, they’ll likely get pulled away from their other projects anytime something comes up needing their attention. If they leave for another job opportunity, get sick, or take a vacation, who will you have in place to step in and take over the monitoring platform? Your organization must make the costly choice to either train additional engineers or be willing to wait it out until that key person comes back.

With today’s hybrid environments, the skills necessary to monitor those networks go beyond simple Ping and SNMP polls. In a cloud environment, you may be better served by API-based polling. For example, AWS offers CloudWatch and CloudTrail. On Azure, it might be Microsoft Insights or Applications Insights. Will your team have expertise in these APIs to be able to utilize them effectively?

Lack of Customization

As the sayings go, square pegs don’t fit round holes and one size doesn’t fit all. Your commercial software platform may monitor your IT infrastructure wonderfully when you first set it up. But you need to have a platform that’s scalable and flexible enough to evolve as your needs change.

Delayed paging, time-based thresholds, and classes of service are flexible features that your NOC service provider can offer that might not be as easily done with an out-of-the-box solution. If those features are available in a commercial solution, chances are they could cost you more to add-on those capabilities, whereas they’re built into the platform provided by an outsourced NOC partner.

One Solution for All

Often, each department within an organization operates their own monitoring platform. There’s no consistency across those silos, and so when outages occur, there’s often confusion around where to look and who is responsible. You check one tool for the network, two others for servers and yet one more for applications. That kind of tool sprawl—multiple tools all doing the same thing—is not just a waste of money, but takes up precious time to compare the different platforms and find out what’s going on whenever there is an issue.

Your Weakest Link

If your internal monitoring system goes down or loses its ability to send emails, will you know? If the hard drive running your monitoring software fails, do you have a backup so you can restore it? Are you monitoring your monitoring? If alerts suddenly stop, you have to have confidence you’ll know about it. If you have a major outage and don’t know about it, you could end up paying for it in the long-run through lost opportunity costs and customer confidence. That’s especially true if you experience an outage after-hours or on a holiday and no one is in the office to catch it.

If your professional NOC partner loses the ability to communicate with their on-site equipment or complete their monitoring processes, they will notify you immediately. Your NOC partner will also backup their monitoring configuration so if something does fail, they can get you back up and running without missing a beat.

At the end of the day, outsourced NOC partners come with fresh eyes to monitor your environment 24×7 and can leverage their expertise with new ways to monitor your infrastructure you might not have considered before. Avoid alert fatigue, focus your staff’s attention on other value-adding projects, and eliminate the high costs of DIY monitoring while remaining confident your IT infrastructure is operating at peak performance.

The Case for 24×7 Outsourced Network Monitoring

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 11:00:00 GMT

In order to weigh the importance of 24×7 network monitoring, it’s worthwhile to step back and understand why monitoring is critically necessary in the first place. Monitoring looks at three key aspects of your network’s operation:

Knowing the status of these three parameters allows you to anticipate problems that can affect your user base before they manifest. However, if you’re only checking your monitoring system periodically, or only when a problem arises, that simply is not enough. Your network monitoring system must provide fault, capacity, and performance data continuously. It requires around the clock monitoring if you intend to prevent outages and other unpredictable issues. In short, 24×7 monitoring keeps you prepared and in control.

Why Every Company Should Be Monitoring their Network Around the Clock

You’ll Minimize Downtime

Unscheduled downtime is the number one cause of lost revenue. According to a Ponemon Institute study , the cost of one minute of downtime reached as high as $17,244 in 2016, assuming a 40-employee company. IBM, IDC, Gartner and others have each offered their estimates, but no matter which you accept, it’s clear that downtime is expensive —both from the standpoint of lost sales opportunities, but also due to the cost of idle time among your employees who are unable to do their work.

The best way to avoid unexpected downtime is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Outages don’t stick to a 9-to-5 schedule. Simply checking your monitoring software when you get to the office each day isn’t enough. An anomaly that occurred last night might well have taken your network or some segments of it out of service.

24×7 network monitoring automatically detects potential problems and sends alerts so that your NOC can take action. You may not have the staff to cover all 24 hours each day, and that’s where outsourcing to a professional NOC gives you an SLA-guaranteed network operation.

24×7 Network Monitoring is an Early Warning System

First, take note that not every alert means a node or a segment is out of service. Oftentimes, an alert signals a symptom that points to a larger problem. For instance, if the hard drive on an email server is signaling that it’s nearing its capacity, that alert gives you the information you need to upgrade the hard drive before it fails, brings down the company’s entire email system, and creates a major disruption to employees, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders.

Potential issues or performance bottlenecks are revealed as soon as they occur. You get an early warning when network engineers monitor your network continuously, as well as the potential for the NOC engineers to solve the problem before it does damage . Simply put: With 24×7 monitoring, your network maintains peak performance even while your team is at home and asleep.

Greater Efficiency Levels

Receiving alerts as they’re issued allows a network engineer to act immediately and prevent disruption to your work force so they can maintain their high levels of productivity and customer service.

Every network occasionally needs to be taken out of service so that updates and patches can be installed. Continuous monitoring allows you to plan for such scheduled downtime, thus avoiding unnecessary disruption during peak hours.

Scale with Demand

Your business has likely grown in the past year, and you’ll want it to grow more over the next year—whether the cause is seasonality or simply the solid, organic growth every business strives for. Continuous monitoring shows you where demands on the network spike, giving you the data you need to make sure your infrastructure can keep pace with that growth.

Perhaps best of all, outsourcing your network monitoring gives you the intelligence you need to scale your network almost without limit, and without adding more employees.

Outsourcing your 24×7 network monitoring means you get all of these added benefits without the time and expense of having to research and select the best network monitoring software, then installing and maintaining it yourself. And yes, without the cost of having to hire new employees.

Contact iGLASS to see how we can help you improve visibility into the health of your infrastructure around the clock.

When to Outsource IT Monitoring Services

david.nizen@ispn.com (David Nizen) — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 12:18:06 GMT

If your business growth has outpaced the size of your IT staff, you might be feeling the growing pains . Has your network monitoring fallen through the cracks as a result? Is your infrastructure monitoring an afterthought or a primary focus?

If you’ve noticed alerts being missed or other signs that your monitoring needs are being overlooked, it’s time to think about outsourcing your monitoring to a network operations center (NOC).

Day-to-Day Monitoring and the Risks of Neglect

When your network is running smoothly and there is nothing much to react to, complacency and neglect of your monitoring tools can set in. Maybe the latest updates and patches were never applied to your monitoring system and as a result, you are not receiving alerts.

As time goes by, other factors can contribute to your network monitoring problems; for example:

Your network has become more complex. You may not have the resources to monitor it effectively.
You are experiencing poor or lagging network performance, and you don’t know why.
You continually receive annoying false alarms and may even have silenced or devised unreliable workarounds for your monitoring platform.
The person who is best able to diagnose your troubles has left your organization, resulting in a loss of institutional knowledge in the IT shop.
You fear (or may have even experienced) the nightmare of a network outage because something was not detected by your network monitoring system.

Now may be the time to outsource your network monitoring . All that remains is overcoming common concerns and understanding why outsourcing your NOC is the way to go.

Addressing Common Outsourcing Concerns

There are natural hesitations that come with deciding to outsource to a third-party NOC partner, including these four:

Budget

Outsourcing IT monitoring services offers many benefits compared to DIY efforts—no upfront investments, 24×7 eyes-on-glass, automatic system upgrades, and scalability to match your growth. Situations where it is cheaper and more efficient to do all that in-house are rare . Not to mention outsourcing doesn’t come with the hefty price tag that it used to, opening it up as an option for smaller companies without large budgets as well.

Throw in the added costs related to downtime , and outsourcing your monitoring to a team of NOC experts is well worth the investment. Statista.com recently published a survey which showed over 98% of the respondents reported that one hour of server downtime cost them at least $50,000. The cost of that one hour is much more than the peace of mind you get from outsourcing to a NOC partner.

Staff Reluctance and Fear

For the benefit of your IT staff, it’s important to note that outsourcing NOC places no one’s job in jeopardy. In fact it makes their job easier and protects them from the exhaustion and burnout that often accompany 24×7 monitoring responsibilities. It also frees them to focus on more productive, business-centered work.

Your NOC services partner is an extension of your team , taking on the tedious jobs that are wasting the valuable time of your staff while also improving your monitoring capabilities. That means your team can focus on higher value projects instead of responding to nuisance alerts.

Loss of Control and Visibility

If you find the right NOC partner , you won’t lose an ounce of control. You won’t need to micromanage their monitoring services day-to-day, and you can demand 100% transparency and regular communication to get updates, especially when issues arise.

Plus, your NOC partner will work with you to develop an SOP runbook. You can specify exactly who should be notified and when, so you can maintain full visibility. Find a NOC partner who offers a live Internet portal, so you can check up on your network’s status at any time, from anywhere.

Security

Before you sign any agreements with a NOC partner, make sure you scope out their previous clients , time in business, and other indicators of their longevity and reliability. An experienced NOC services provider wouldn’t still be in business if they failed to provide a secure environment for your data.

Their systems and procedures are created to safeguard your information, including keeping your data entirely separate from any other clients they have. To ease your mind, don’t be afraid to ask your potential partner about how they protect your data.

Outsourcing Beats DIY

It’s time to outsource your NOC monitoring when a provider can do it better, more reliably and cost effectively, and will work as a close partner with your business. You cannot afford to neglect network monitoring, and you don’t have to hire more IT staff or invest in additional resources and expertise to do monitoring well.

iGLASS Networks Adds 2-Factor Authentication Support

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 13:46:00 GMT

iGLASS is pleased to announce that as part of our commitment to the security and integrity of customer data, our NOC Services Monitoring Portal now supports 2-Factor Authentication. If you have any questions regarding this support, or how to enable it for your account, please contact the NOC.

8 Benefits of Partnering with a NOC Services Provider

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 15:25:00 GMT

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.

iGLASS Announces Calix SMx Support

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:00:00 GMT

iGLASS Networks is pleased to announce support for Calix AXOS SMx, with E7 & E9 ONTs, available immediately. Calix SMx joins our existing support for Calix DPx and Calix CMS/E7. Please enjoy this quick video demo or contact us for more information!

Kaseya VSA Ransomware Attack

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 11:00:00 GMT

On the heels of last year’s SolarWinds attack, cybercriminals continue to make headlines, with the most recent attack occurring on Kaseya VSA products affecting approximately 50 MSPs and up to 1,500 downstream organizations across the globe.

iGLASS does not use Kaseya VSA products, and has not been impacted by this attack. With that said, it’s important to understand what happened and how you can protect your own organization going forward.

What Happened?

On July 2, 2021, cybercriminals attacked and penetrated Kaseya’s VSA software, which is used to manage IT infrastructure for thousands of SMB clients.

These hackers turned the Kaseya software into a “Trojan Horse,” using it to deploy ransomware to Kaseya’s MSP customers (and thousands of their customers), locking the victims’ computers and demanding payments to unlock them. To their credit, Kaseya took swift action to mitigate the attack and limit the number of MSP customers affected.

You can read the official report and updates from Kaseya here .

How you can protect your own organization

Of course, preventative measures are important as they reduce the risk of a ransomware infection. But, if they fail, a well-planned incident response plan helps your organization take immediate action to reduce the severity (and cost) of an attack, much like Kaseya’s plan helped them respond to this attack.

Having a security incident response plan outlines critical steps like containing the infection (ransomware likes to spread), engaging legal counsel and insurance providers, communicating with clients and partners, conducting analysis, and restoring operations.

Additional Resources

The United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation have extensive resources available to help you protect your business.

iGLASS Achieves SOC 2 Type II Attestation

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 11:00:00 GMT

Independent Audit Verifies iGLASS Networks’ Internal Controls and Processes

Cary, NC – iGLASS Networks, a leading provider of outsourced NOC as a Service, today announced that it has completed its SOC 2 Type II audit, performed by KirkpatrickPrice . This attestation provides evidence that iGLASS Networks has a strong commitment to security and delivering high-quality services to its clients by demonstrating they have the necessary internal controls and processes in place.

“For years iGLASS Networks has said that security is job 1,” said Timothy Bolden, President of iGLASS Networks. “In every decision we make the security ramifications are taken into account. Our team has worked very hard over the last several years to put in place a framework that provides assurance to our customers that the security of their networks and ours is a top priority. Completing our SOC 2 Type 2 audit attests to security as a priority and the manner in which we operate our business.”

About iGLASS Networks

iGLASS Networks is a high-touch, boutique provider of outsourced NOC services. From their Network Operations Center in Cary, NC, iGLASS personnel provide their customers with turn-key 24×7 monitoring, alerting, reporting and remediation of IP-based networks, servers, applications and web sites. With over 22 years of experience, iGLASS can meet most any monitoring challenge a customer encounters. Utilizing proprietary monitoring methods and expertise, iGLASS is able to minimize false alerts and verify not just the availability of network assets, but also the proper operation of those assets.

About KirkpatrickPrice

Blog - iGLASS Networks

Twin Valley Case Study

iGLASS Achieves SOC 2 Type II Recertification

Independent Audit Verifies iGLASS Networks’ Internal Controls and Processes

ISPN’s Partnership with Align Capital Partners: Driving Broadband Innovation and Customer Success

Lumos launches Outsourced NOC in Record Time with iGLASS

How NOC Partnerships Help Credit Unions Overcome IT Challenges

Validating Automated Banking Applications Around the Clock

Battling ATM Skimmers

Monitoring Automated Nightly Closeout Jobs/Processes

Partner with a NOC that Provides Expertise Beyond Your In-House Assets

Benefits of Choosing NOC as a Service

Why Your Organization Needs NOC as a Service

What are Outsourced NOC Services?

How is this different from Managed Services?

Internal NOC Team vs. Outsourced NOC Service Provider

NOC vs. SOC: Comparing Outsourced Services

NOC vs. SOC: Comparing Outsourced Services

Protecting Network Infrastructure

What is a Network Operations Center (NOC)?

A NOC monitors the health and availability of your:

Other functions of the NOC include:

Why Outsourcing your NOC Makes Sense

These advantages include:

What is a Security Operations Center (SOC)?

Responsibility of Security Operations Centers

Boosting Business Success: Outsourcing Your NOC and Network Monitoring

NOC Monitoring as a Service

The Purpose of a Network Operations Center (NOC)

The Five Benefits of Outsourcing NOC and Network Monitoring

The Role of NOC Monitoring

Outsourcing: Pros and Cons

Services Provided by a NOC

Calix ConneXions 2023

Key Differences Between a Broadband Help Desk and an Outsourced NOC Service

Broadband Help Desk Providers Provide Support to Individual Subscribers

Outsourced NOC Services Partners Focus on Your Core Networks

The Top 5 Infrastructure Monitoring Challenges of Growing Organizations

Unique Monitoring Challenges Facing Enterprise Organizations

High Availability and Scalability

Geographic Distribution

The Problem with Performance Monitoring Portals

Customization: The Multiple Tools Problem

The Reporting Problem

How Remote Network Monitoring Solutions Benefit Organizations With Multiple Locations

Challenges Faced in a Multi-site Environment

The Benefits of Outsourced Network Monitoring

1. Expertise and Experience

2. Support is Available 24×7

3. Proactive Detection & Remediation

4. Monitoring Critical Infrastructure & Applications

5. Empowering Your IT Resources for Maximum Value

6. Fast and Efficient Deployment

Regain Control of Your Remote Business Locations

Tuning Out Apathy to False Alerts

Tuning out Apathy to False Alerts

iGLASS Networks Joins the ISPN Family

iGLASS Networks Joins the ISPN Family: Bringing 24x7 NOC Service to the ISPN Solutions Toolkit

The Real Cost of DIY Network Monitoring

On-call Burnout

Alert Fatigue

Skills & Training Investment

Lack of Customization

One Solution for All

Your Weakest Link

The Case for 24×7 Outsourced Network Monitoring

Why Every Company Should Be Monitoring their Network Around the Clock

You’ll Minimize Downtime

24×7 Network Monitoring is an Early Warning System

Greater Efficiency Levels

Scale with Demand

When to Outsource IT Monitoring Services

Day-to-Day Monitoring and the Risks of Neglect

Addressing Common Outsourcing Concerns

Budget

Staff Reluctance and Fear

Loss of Control and Visibility

Security

﻿ Outsourcing Beats DIY

iGLASS Networks Adds 2-Factor Authentication Support

NOC vs. SOC:
Comparing Outsourced Services

Outsourcing Beats DIY