For most businesses, the success of your company depends heavily on your network and IT systems operating properly.
To ensure stability, functionality, and security, it’s critical to have a highly capable resource continuously monitoring your systems, 365 x 24 x 7.
Outsourcing NOC (Network Operation Centers) can help organizations of all sizes to monitor, measure, secure, and analyze their mission critical data, along with supporting micro-services, managing the network, and more efficiently run business applications.
Why companies choose to outsource NOC
Businesses are experiencing a ‘Cloudifying Effect.’ More processes are being pushed to the cloud at an exponential rate.
With this growth, fewer companies are looking at staffing their NOC with FTE’s on the ground to manage IT operations, when their applications and production are transitioning into more hyperscale environments.
It’s also challenging to retain qualified personnel to manage in-house operations services. Employees managing IT operations often spend most of their time tracking problems rather than solving problems for their organization.
This results in higher costs per reported problem, lower user satisfaction, and reduced productivity.
Outsourcing NOC can reduce operational costs and free up valuable internal resources to work on strategic initiatives while optimizing workflow and processes. Below are some of the benefits companies experience with an outsourced NOC or NOC-as-a-Service (NOCaaS).
Outsourcing NOCaaS benefits:
- Tier 1-3 support and escalation management teams help resolve incidents and communicate quickly
- Dedicated, knowledgeable staff to reduce ticket volume without adding additional internal FTE staff
- Automated quality assurance testing, data security/penetration testing, and documented compliance testing
- Reduced administrative burden and lower costs related to IT operations and support
- Increased reliability, improved efficiencies, and peace of mind for IT executives
- Monitoring and alerting with on demand major incident support
- Build, Operate, Transfer (BOT) setup of a NOC
- Create NOC response playbooks
- Building health and business product dashboards as needed
- Incorporate AI driven initiatives for incident response and remediation
- Build change management processes
- Advise on new or current tool sets to increase best practice frameworks
Here are a few key questions you should be asking NOCaaS providers:
Is the NOC Outsourcing provider experienced with your applications and infrastructure?
You want a provider who will hit the ground running, otherwise you’ll waste valuable time as they come up to speed – and you’ll spend even more time firefighting service outages along the way. Look for a provider with a proven track record of managing your types of applications and infrastructure – whether that’s a Cisco contact center or a VMware private cloud.
Can they scale to support your business as it grows?
There are hundreds of providers out there – and they’re not all created equal. Before you choose a provider to manage your outsourced NOC services, ask whether they have the capacity to effectively support your business projections for the next 2-5 years.
Do they follow best practice ITIL processes?
ITIL is more than an acronym. It’s a proven way of delivering vastly increased visibility and control of IT processes. In a NOC environment, ITIL incident management provides a structured, formalized framework for managing service issues – delivering a range of key benefits including more timely resolution of service outages, increased operational efficiency, enhanced visibility for business stakeholders, and consistent capture of incident information to support ongoing process optimization.
How quickly can the NOC outsourcing provider diagnose and remediate service issues?
The goal of a NOC is to keep critical business services up and running. Unless your NOC provider can reliably restore service within a well-defined and acceptable period, you’re putting your business at risk. Ask about the provider’s NOC platform. If they use a disconnected set of tools, then the chances are that it will take them longer to restore service.
Try StrataCore
If you are considering NOCaaS for your company, we can help bring clarity to the hundreds of providers out there. Contact one of our experts here to set up a quick discovery call.
