What Is a NOC? Network Operations Centers, Explained

Almost a billion dollars!

That’s how much the biggest social media platforms under Meta lost to an unexpected network outage that lasted for six hours. News like this is a reminder of how common and disastrous network downtimes are to organizations — and downtime costs a lot.

Beyond the financial cost, network downtimes kills productivity and tarnishes the reputation of both your IT team and the whole organization. Which is why Network Operations Centers (NOC) are a must for enterprises and businesses that value the health of their network.

In this article, we’re diving into NOCs, how they work, benefits, challenges and best practices for getting the most from them.

Let’s begin!

What is an NOC?

A network operations center (NOC) is a centralized location where IT teams can provide 24/7 monitoring and maintenance for the performance and health of a network. To give this 24/7 support, NOCs have many employees that work various shifts to cover it fully. 

The NOC is the first line of defense against network disruptions and failures. They’re designed specifically to prevent downtime so that customers and internal end users don’t even realize when inevitable incidents or outages do occur.

So, we can say, network admins and NOC engineers work backend and don’t get to interact one-on-one with the end user the way help-desk staff do.

Responsibilities of NOCs

Through the NOC (pronounced “knock”), organizations gain complete visibility into their network to detect anomalies and take steps to prevent problems or quickly resolve issues as they emerge. The NOC oversees infrastructure and equipment from wiring to servers, wireless systems, databases, firewalls, various related network devices (including IoT devices and smartphones), telecommunications, dashboards, and reporting.

The NOC plays a massive role in ensuring a positive customer experience with management services that monitor:

• Customer support calls
• Help desk ticketing systems 
• Integration with customers’ network tools

NOCs can be built internally and located on-premise, often within the data center, or outsourced to an external company specializing in network and infrastructure monitoring and management. Regardless of the design, NOC staff are responsible for spotting issues and making quick decisions on how to resolve them.

(Know the difference between NOCs & SOCs.)

How do NOCs work? 

NOCs will often take a hierarchical approach to incident management. Technicians are typically categorized — Levels 1, 2, or 3, based on their skill and experience in resolving specific issues. Once a NOC technician discovers a problem, they will create a ticket that categorizes the issue based on alert type, severity, and other criteria.

If the NOC technician assigned to a specific problem level fails to resolve it quickly enough, it moves up to the next level. It continues to escalate until the ongoing issue is fully resolved.

(Learn about incident severity levels and how teams target their incident response.) 

Components of a network operations center

The essential components of an NOC that keep it running span the people, processes, and technology trifecta:

People

This refers to the roles that make up the NOC team, such as:

• NOC manager: in charge of budget, operations, and staffing.
• NOC engineer: in charge of troubleshooting, network monitoring, and problem resolution. 
• NOC analyst: analyzes network performance, security, and availability.
• NOC technician: provides technical support to the NOC Engineers, Analysts, and end users.

Processes

These are standard operating processes (SOPs) or frameworks for responding to alerts, managing disasters, and troubleshooting like: 

• ITIL 4 is a comprehensive, standard framework for IT service management.
• ISO/IEC 20000 is the international standard for IT service management.
• Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT) is a framework for organizations to govern and manage their IT resources and processes.
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers a framework that helps organizations protect their systems and networks and reduce their cyber risk. 

(Related reading: common risk management frameworks, including the NIST RMF.)

Platform

These are the tools and technologies i.e., hardware and software, for managing the network infrastructure. They include:

• Monitoring tools
• Network management systems (NMS)
• Ticketing system
• Alert systems
• Backup and recovery systems 

NOC functions: what happens in NOCs

NOCs maintain optimal network performance and availability. To ensure continuous uptime, they carry out the following functions:

• Network monitoring for problems that require special attention, including those originating from outside sources.
• Server, device and network management, including software installation, updates, troubleshooting and distribution across all devices.
• Incident response, including managing power failures and communication line issues
• Security, including monitoring, threat analysis and tool deployment, in conjunction with security operations.
• Backup and storage; disaster recovery and business continuity operations
• Email, voice and video data management
• Patch management
• Firewall and intrusion prevention system management and antivirus support.
• Policy enforcement.
• Improvement of services through the collection of feedback and user recommendations
• Service level agreement follow through
• Vendor, freelancer and contractor management

Benefits of an NOC

The impact of a functional NOC can be felt in different ways, some of which are:

Business continuity

NOCs ensure that network connectivity and performance directly impacting the business operations and customer satisfaction, is constantly catered to. This in turn leads to less disgruntled customers and a thriving business environment. 

(Related reading: business continuity explained.)

24/7 monitoring and support

The always-on nature of NOCs means network systems are constantly being evaluated for issues even at nights, during holidays and bad weather conditions. 

Improved network performance

By predicting issues and proactively getting rid of them, NOCs contribute in keeping network systems running which means less downtimes, an optimized bandwidth and network infrastructure for better performance.

Cost-effectiveness

The combination of the responsiveness and proactiveness of NOCs leads to less network failures, data and productivity loss that would cost more to resolve. 

Challenges of running a successful NOC

Although NOCs are high-functioning spaces, they come with their own challenges such as:

High operational cost. NOCs are quite expensive to run, which is why they are mainly found in large organizations and enterprises. The cost of purchasing hardware, paying for software and other communication tools can be discouraging despite the obvious benefits of an NOC.

Talent shortage. While certain network roles are easy to get into, your NOC will require more skilled personnel to keep up with issues as the organisation grows and things get more complex. Hence, lack of access to professionals or inability to compensate them is a common problem in NOCs. However, outsourced NOC services offer a way out of this issue.

Technological changes. The advancement of technology which is an obvious blessing can be a stumbling block to the success of NOCs. This is because trends are constantly changing, network issues are becoming more sophisticated and tools have to be updated to keep up with the changing ecosystem. This can leave NOCs overwhelmed and unable to give in their best.

NOC best practices

The following practices must be in place for you to get the best from your NOC and its team:

Making training and knowledge development a top priority 

Your NOC team must have high-level expertise in monitoring, managing, and resolving issues specific to network performance and your IT infrastructure.

• Provide robust and frequent training on procedures and protocols for any event.
• Keep up with the changing tech landscape and changes to your IT environment.
• Prioritize network performance issues, but don’t overlook procedures for collaborating with your SOC on security issues. 

A key procedural issue is escalation — make sure your staff knows how and when to quickly escalate a growing problem to a more experienced teammate. In addition, building a knowledge base where past, resolved issues are documented can quicken response time and help your NOC team predict and de-escalate issues.

Defining clear roles

Flatter organizational hierarchies are more popular these days. In the fast-paced, must-act-now world of network monitoring, empowering each team member rather than rigidly insisting on rank- or role-based handoffs make sense. Yet, while technicians should be equipped with the knowledge and authority to act quickly to prevent network failures, you still need escalation tiers and shift supervisors to oversee the NOC.

While NOC technicians should be mainly left to do their jobs and offer insight — and indeed, they should not be micromanaged — you need a leader who assigns work to technicians based on their skills, prioritizes tasks, prepares reports, ensures incidents are being resolved properly and notifies the broader organization of events as needed. 

Additionally, each technician should know what tasks will be expected of them, their level, and the line of reporting should they need to escalate an incident or respond to one.

Enabling strong communication

Keeping the lines of communication open — within the NOC, SOC, and other external teams — can be challenging. It’s more than just setting up a few periodic meetings; it takes a concerted effort to train staff on how and when to share information and hold them accountable. Creating regular opportunities for collaboration and coordination is key to a solid NOC.

Establish clear guidelines and protocols. Keep things running smoothly by creating clear-cut policies for the following:

• Incident management: Document steps the technicians should follow to handle incidents (e.g., when the technician can decide to escalate or when to notify team members).
• Solutions: Outline procedures for dealing with common issues and provide immediate methods for dealing with emergencies.
• Escalation: Determine how the team should escalate issues and to whom.
• Prioritization: Establish which incidents take the highest priority and which technician level should handle the most important ones. Incidents should be ranked based on how much they will affect the business.

Having well-established protocols ensures everyone is on the same page, provides consistency across the organization, and increases accountability among NOC staff. Of course, having the right people and processes in place lays the foundation, but the actual work can’t be done with the right tools.

How to measure the effectiveness of your NOC

Several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be used to analyze the effectiveness of your NOC center, and they include:

• CPU usage
• Incident volume
• Network availability
• Mean time to detect
• Mean time to resolve
• First-call resolution rate
• Cost per resolved incident
• Time to impact assessment
• Frequency of recurring incidents

(Related reading: incident response metrics, reliability metrics & failure metrics.)

How to choose the right tools for your NOC

The tool you invest in is largely dependent on your business needs, but your NOC requires a tool or combination of tools that provides the following:

• Comprehensive view of your infrastructure: Whether it’s physical, virtual or in the cloud.
• Automation: To cut down on repetitive tasks, freeing up Level 1 staff to focus on higher-priority issues while also reducing alert fatigue.
• Ticket management: So you can view information related to open tickets, including priority tasks and the assigned technician, to ensure you resolve internal and external issues quickly.
• Incident reporting: A tool that provides visual analysis, and graphical representation of thresholds, alarms, indicators and trends makes it easier to investigate issues and document them for the future.
• Simple interface and deployment: You want to see immediate benefits and not have to battle through a lengthy, complex deployment and a long learning curve.
• Scalability: As your business grows, you want to ensure the NOC can handle it.

The tool you choose should offer you full visibility across your entire network and enable you to drill down deeper, investigate issues and improve your overall incident response as time goes on.