While some may argue about the misconception around the diminishing role of NOC in the workplace, it is still highly unlikely to happen. Manpower is still needed to assess business impact and maturing the automated processes and orchestration with different technologies is a continuous journey, not a destination. This makes it exciting for NOC teams worldwide.
Let’s start from the beginning. Network Operations Center (NOC) is a central location where the network infrastructure of an organization is managed by a team of IT professionals who are basically composed of network monitoring analysts and network engineers. NOC teams are usually grouped into different levels of support where L1 engineers are entrusted with monitoring the network and performing basic troubleshooting, while L2 engineers are responsible for performing network configuration changes and work on issues escalated from L1.
In some organizations, the two tiers of support are already combined. Large enterprises even have L3 and L4 teams who are responsible for problem management and managing global migration projects. Regardless of how many levels of support are existing in an organization, the NOC is the main group accountable for ensuring that the business transactions utilizing the network remain functional, with minimal disruption and downtime as much as possible.
The activities being performed by NOC teams include, but not limited to, monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting the network. Whenever there is a reported network issue, an engineer must be available to troubleshoot and resolve the issue at hand either by checking the alarms in the monitoring tools or logging in to the devices to check logs and other parameters.
What’s Changing?
NOCs has changed tremendously over the years. When network operations centers were in their early years, their focus revolves around the availability and integrity of the network. Most of the tools were utilized to ensure that the network is up and running. Most of the activities, including event and incident management, ticketing, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis (RCA), are performed manually.
As the NOC evolves, its focus has shifted to network automation and ensuring the network is in its optimal performance. While NOC still ensures that the network is highly available, it has changed its direction from up/down monitoring to ensuring the quality of service (QoS) is working, removing bottlenecks, and controlling the level of compression to name a few.
Ticketing systems also started to progress with their capability to be integrated with several network tools using API. This makes it possible for tickets to be automatically created given certain conditions as defined in event and incident management.
Programming languages also started being integrated with the network to automate all possible manual tasks such as device upgrades, compliance remediation, and many more. Multiple changes can also be done simultaneously using automation scripts or APIs. These are just some of the innovations that NOC teams should aim to implement in the near future.
Workforce Transformation
With all these changes and network automation initiatives, NOC teams will be able to manage the network with ease. Network engineers will no longer need to troubleshoot similar issues over and over again.
Again, manpower is still needed to assess business impact and maturing the automated processes and orchestration with different technologies is a continuous journey, not a destination.
Adapting to New Technologies
Digital transformation has come a long way since it was first coined. Through the years, more and more technologies are being invented and developed to change how we work, play, and live.
In the network space, different network technologies have also progressed since the Internet was invented. Most of the innovations that we have seen aim to transform how NOC manage, troubleshoot, and optimize the network.
Here are just some of the features that new technologies have:
1. Self-Healing Networks
The most common problem of NOC teams is troubleshooting an issue and the speed at which they can resolve it; also known as mean time to repair. The self-healing feature uses machine-learning technology. With the data gathered by the tools, issues can easily be identified and resolved. Thus, self-healing networks prevent service-impacting network outages and greatly reduce the time it takes to resolve any network issue that the tool is already aware of.
2. Fully automated (Zero-touch) management
NOC teams for large enterprises usually support a huge number of network devices. So, instead of logging in to each device when performing bulk changes, new technologies today have features that can implement changes to multiple devices using templates in SDWAN and scripts like Python. This enables change management to be fully automated (zero-touch).
3. Predictive Analysis
A second or a minute of network outage can cost the business a huge amount of loss. One of the best ways to avoid this is to predict when an issue will impact the business. Technologies today have a feature to predict an issue using the data gathered in the network and take action on it immediately like SDWAN technologies.
4. Complete Network Integration
As more and more technologies are being developed, it is critical that NOC has tools that can be integrated into other tools for easier management. Alarm monitoring and ticket management are some of the examples of network integration that is highly beneficial for NOC teams.
5. Network Virtualization
Now that organizations are making their way towards the cloud, virtualization is moving the network to the same direction. As the number of desktops and servers deployed in the cloud continues to increase, the need to migrate network devices to a virtual environment has also become a necessity to some organizations.
Avoiding the Pitfalls
It’s easy to ride the digital wave but not having a transformation strategy is one of the pitfalls organizations should try to avoid. While agility is being embraced in the digital world, having no direction can lead to a dead end. There must still be a balance between adapting quickly and planning out both short-term and long-term strategies.
In order for organizations to do this, industry experts must deliberately discuss the pros and cons of new technology in consideration. Weighing options is more than this or that. Discussions should address all the nits and grits, as well as the ability of the workforce to support the planned changes.
Exclusive Download: Get access to the process that top telecoms use to rapidly and reliably diagnose with low mean time to repair. Click here to download.
Embracing the Future
Transforming the future of NOC lies in the ability of an organization to strategize on the long-term plans, progress with relevance, and continuously adapt as they move forward. The magnitude by which the organization wants to partake in its digital transformation journey depends greatly on its overall business goals and technology trends that may come in useful for NOC teams.
With this in mind, the NOC’s vision should be evaluated regularly to survive the ever-changing technology and business needs. The goal of every organization must be to have a “future-proof” NOC that can support the overall operations of the business.
We’re honored to be building this future with our customers everyday.
