A Network Operations Center often called a NOC (pronounced “knock”), is typically a centralized location where the network operation staff provides 24x7x365 supervision, monitoring, and management of the network, servers, databases, firewalls, devices, and related external services. This infrastructure environment may be located on-premises and/or with a cloud-based provider.
Challenges Facing Network Operations
Because of the complexities involved with today’s networks and services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, there are many challenges that network operations staff face not only associated with having a thorough understanding of the technology itself but in maintaining streamlined communications access between all those involved.
Some key network operation challenges include:
- Lack of collaboration/coordination across teams
- The fast pace of change in the cloud and dynamic resource orchestration means that documentation is usually not up-to-date for troubleshooting problems
- Troubleshooting is time-consuming because it often involves correlating data across multiple devices and tool sets and requires manual processes to arrive at sound diagnoses
- Many disparate tools from different vendors in use may require staff work with different technologies, low-level utilities, and Command Line Interfaces (CLI)
- Problems arise and then disappear by the time all information is collected that is necessary for troubleshooting
- Escalation to more senior staff is required frequently to assess root causes
NST NOC Operations Center Best Practices
The NST NOC solution provides management, control, and monitoring of your networks. It ensures your networks are operating optimally across all platforms, mediums, and communication channels. Our NOC is manned by experienced systems engineers on a 24×7 basis. We monitor your network for alarms or abnormal situations that require attention in order to avoid network degradation. Our team analyses problems, troubleshoots, communicates with site technicians, and tracks problems through to resolution.
Specifically, our NOC technicians manage, amongst other things:
- Application installation, updating, and troubleshooting
- Email, Backup and storage management
- Network discovery and assessments
- Asset management
- Policy enforcement
- Privileged access management and auditing
- Firewall and intrusion prevention
- Anti-Virus scanning and remediation
- Shared threat analysis
- Vulnerability assessment
- Patch management
- Monitoring
- Reporting, including improvement recommendation
- Voice and video traffic management
- WAN performance management
- Software licensing compliance
- Annual software subscriptions for software such as Anti-Virus, firewalls, etc.
Get In Touch With Us Today!
As an extension of your IT organization, we proactively manage & ensure the performance of your networked environment, directly from our 24×7 Network Operations Centre. NST has offices in Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne. You can get in touch with it by clicking here. The company is currently offering FREE VoIP trials for Australian businesses as a promotion. It is an excellent opportunity for you to check the quality of its service free of charge. For details on this special offer, please click here.