The Services a NOC Provides

If you want high system availability, you need infrastructure monitoring tools that can reliably monitor and alert on a flexible set of metrics. These measures measure the daily health of your infrastructure. A well-designed network infrastructure works normally without problems, i.e. until, for example, excessive bandwidth saturation creates excessive latency which leads to failure.

NOC Monitoring Services to detect and correct infrastructure accidents. These services include monitoring the integrity and availability of:

• Networks
• Router and switch
• The waiters
• Applications
• Internet sites
• Firewall
• VPN tunnel
• Wireless access points
• LAN / WAN / MAN
• Power systems and installations

Professional NOC Services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to monitor the network infrastructure. With additional level 1 repair services, they will work to prevent errors and degradation, resolve problems before they become expensive downtime and limit outages.

Services That NOC’s Augment - What They Do, and Don’t Do

Internet security

Strictly speaking, an NOC is not a resource dedicated to security oversight - that's what security operations centers (or SOCs) need. However, thanks to its 24/7 surveillance, it acts as a vanguard for operational security centers. NOCs can monitor and respond to security warnings from firewalls and security monitoring devices. For example, A NOC can be integrated into ATMs and their system validations can detect machine failures or possible forgeries associated with skimming ATMs. The NOC can inform those who must respond within minutes, rather than hours, of the accident, thus mitigating further losses.

A NOC can be an early warning for something that's not entirely fair. For example, network monitoring can detect excessive connection errors, scan open backdoor ports, or attempt to break a firewall. Bots and all types of malware can enter through the backdoor or through the firewall. Network monitoring can detect user access and behavior for comparison with current known threats through proactive network monitoring. Therefore, although the NOCs do not provide security services, their surveillance and reporting could trigger alarm signals that could be passed on to the appropriate security officers.

MSP and helpdesk

A NOC can act as a "silent" MSP partner as long as the end-user is not aware of the presence of the NOC. NOC technicians work with the MSP provider to provide first-class behind-the-scenes assistance for specialized services.

As for the helpdesk, an important distinction and the main difference is that a helpdesk interacts with end-users; the NOC interacts with IT staff. The NOC is the service partner that the IT team relies on for system stability.

So all this high-level support capability leads to an important question: should you hire, train and pay the best price for NOC technicians to fill your IT skills gap? If you are an MSP, this would increase operating costs. If you are running a business, you probably don't want the extra drain on wages and training costs, not to mention the acquisition and updating of the technology.