It is already more than consolidated that businesses nowadays have their operations based on IT. In this context, knowing what NOC is relevant to get the best performance from the resources.
Through this practice, you will be able to make your business more resolute and efficient, as well as preventing disturbances and unavailability of IT resources.
Knowing what NOC is and putting it into practice, your company's IT management will certainly be well done, reflecting gains for the business as a whole.
Therefore, continue reading this text and discover not only what NOC is, but the importance of carrying out this in your company as soon as possible.
What is NOC?
The acronym NOC refers to Network Operation Center.
But what does it mean? It's very simple, despite being something from the universe of Information Technology (IT).
The NOC basically refers to the entire structure of IT professionals dedicated to monitoring and managing IT business events.
What this means?
We know that technology is constantly being updated and that errors and failures are likely to occur during the performance of certain software, for example.
Imagine that there was a big problem in your company's customer call-taking software, but no one has noticed it, as it wasn't being monitored.
The error was only discovered because your customers got in touch demanding a quick resolution for an open call that has not yet had a response from the company.
Only after this customer contact your IT team search for the error and tried to react with an appropriate resolution.
But before everything returns to normal, a lot of time was wasted – and the customer satisfaction with your business may have been shaken.
This scenario is terrible, isn't it?
So think about the opposite: your company has a team (in-house or outsourced) especially dedicated to monitoring all IT occurrences, which immediately identify the problem with the ticketing system.
Quickly, it starts working to resolve the failure and restores normal operations. Your customer didn't even realize something was wrong nor was your business negatively impacted.
Much better, right?
So you've already started to get an idea of what NOC is, how it works in practice and the importance of this monitoring of networks. Learn more below.
How does the NOC work and how important is network monitoring?
Monitoring is a basic NOC practice, but that's not all it does. The NOC also runs scripts that aim to stabilize incidents as they occur.
In addition, it provides data to the teams that provide infrastructure support, which allows them to have a history of occurrences and it can learn and think about improvement strategies.
The NOC also generates reports that show the capacity of IT assets and their availability, all contributing to the effective stability of networks.
Usually NOC-specific software is used, which can only work during the company's business hours, during the night or 24 hours a day, every day.
This choice will depend on the company's demand, that is, whether it really needs uninterrupted monitoring or whether this can be done at certain times.
You can see the importance of the NOC from all this information presented, as it allows your company to discover problems as they occur.
This contributes so that the technology error does not cause greater damage to the company's operation, even causing financial losses.
One example is Amazon. In 2013, the large retailer was down for 49 minutes, and this caused a financial loss of about five million dollars.
More recently, Amazon Web Services (Amazon's cloud storage service) went down, taking countless businesses around the world offline.
See other impacts that technology inactivity, also called downtime, can cause in your company:
- Breach of contracts (with customers or suppliers);
- Negative impression regarding the company's brand or value in the market;
- IT employees' trust is shaken;
- Reduction of performance in various departments;
- And even the stoppage of activities.
Now that you know what NOC is, how it works and how important it is to perform network monitoring, check out some advantages of adopting this practice.
Advantages of NOC
Throughout this text, you could see that having the NOC in your company is an efficient way to monitor networks, ensuring the good performance of IT resources.
See now other advantages that this practice provides:
Continuous monitoring
It doesn't matter if the NOC works only during office hours or every day, 24 hours a day. What matters is that there will be constant monitoring of the networks.
Availability of IT resources
The NOC is a way to ensure that your business' IT resources are always available, reducing the unwanted downtime effects we saw earlier.
Efficiency in resolution
By identifying a failure at the exact moment it occurs, analysts are able to work on resolving it efficiently, without wasting precious time that can be devoted to other strategies.
Increased productivity
Continuous monitoring via the system makes IT administrators reduce the time spent looking for errors in the networks, increasing productivity and making it more agile to resolve failures that could impact the end user.
Fast data collection
Monitoring allows a lot of data to be collected immediately, generating assertive and up-to-date reports on the status of networks and necessary improvements.
Prevention
When you carry out constant monitoring of networks, you can prevent major problems from occurring, arising from some systemic malfunction.
Risk management
With NOC, it is possible to implement a risk management culture, which consists of a set of actions that are considered strategic to identify, manage, prevent and conduct the risks related to IT activities. By knowing what NOC is, you could understand how monitoring is important for efficient business management. Good software such as Hosts.Green can help with this process. Learn more by visiting our article about Server Monitoring Tool: Meet Hosts.Green.
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