Earlier in this series, we gave an introduction to the NOC services and the general benefits associated with them. In this new blog post we dive deeper into the operational benefits for companies when they choose NOC as a Service (Naas).
IT employees with knowledge and skills in network management exist in different types and tastes. An NOC employee must have different characteristics and qualifications than a network engineer. An NOC employee loves to keep everything under control and prevent an incident from occurring. He likes to keep an eye on all parameters, so that he can prevent an incident from occurring in time. Should an incident nevertheless occur, he will be happy to solve the problem. Or he will call in one or more other persons to solve the incident with just as much pleasure.
Talent makes the difference
An NOC employee has his own career path. Talent is scarce and an NOC employee is looking for a challenge. The size of an in-house NOC is limited by the size of the organization it supports. A NaaS does not have this limitation. Within a NOC as a Service, a NOC operator has more opportunities for development, variety, specialization and growth. The advantage for the customer? The NaaS has more customer-oriented, motivated and specialized network operators.
As indicated, the NOC operator is a specific IT person. Of course you can also have a team of network engineers perform NOC tasks. But that is at the expense of what the network engineers should actually do. Companies that opt for a NOC as a Service can have their network engineers do what they were hired to do – build and maintain excellent networks. This increases the job satisfaction and productivity among network engineers. It also ensures that network engineers stay with their employer longer.
Downtime minimalization
An NOC as a Service is always available and has enough expertise to prevent incidents. The employees have a real-time overview of the network. Without a NOC, monitoring a network is a lot more difficult and it quickly becomes an afterthought. If a problem then occurs, the organization must suddenly free up time and resources to (reactively) resolve the incident that has arisen. The downtime is relatively long in this context. Companies that opt for NOC as a Service usually have a much shorter downtime and that is because this NOC continuously monitors the network and can take proactive measures in time. In this way, they can prevent or limit downtime as much as possible.
Noise versus information
Monitoring a network and all its components is a profession in itself. NOC employees use tools to carry out their monitoring activities. In order to be able to use these tools properly, however, specific knowledge is required.
Of course, any organization can purchase monitoring tools for their networks. But do they have the right knowledge to use these tools properly? Even though much can be automated, incident response usually requires a network savvy human being. But monitoring tooling first creates a different problem, namely the sheer amount of alerts that is generated.
Complex infrastructures with interconnections and relationships between network components tend to generate lots of alerts. Monitoring in the event of failures can quickly lead to an overwhelming amount of alerts. The responsible employee is no longer able to identify the actual problem because of ths. The many alerts cause a considerable amount of noise that makes it impossible to determine the actual cause. A professional NOC operator is familiar with the right monitoring tools and knows how to use them to separate sense and nonsense in this type of situation in order to penetrate more quickly to the cause of the problem. He is able to retrieve the necessary information and initiate the right action to solve the problem.
Would you like to learn more about NOC as a service or do you want to talk to one of our experts? Read the other blogs in this series or get in touch.
