What Network operations? & Best Practices

Network operations refer to activities carried out by internal network personnel or third parties on which companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage and respond to alerts on the availability and performance of their network. Staff with primary responsibility for network operations are often referred to as network operations analysts or network operations engineers.

A Network Operations Center, often referred to as a NOC (pronounced "knock"), is typically a centralized location where network operations staff provide 24/7 surveillance, monitoring, and management, 7 days a week, 365 days a week. day, 365 days a year This infrastructure environment can be located on the site and / or with a cloud provider.

Some key activities in the functioning of the network are:

• Network monitoring
• Accident response
• Communication management (e-mail, voice and video)
• Performance, quality and optimization reports
• Software/firmware installation, troubleshooting, and updating of network elements
• Patch management
• Backup and archiving
• Firewall management
• Intrusion prevention system (IPS) and other tools and implementation and monitoring of security tools, in collaboration with Security Operations
• Threat analysis and explosion beam analysis in collaboration with security operations

Challenges Facing Network Operations

Due to the complexity of today's NOC Services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, network operations personnel face many challenges not only related to a deep understanding of the technology itself, but maintains simplified access to communications between all parties involved.

Here are some of the main challenges related to the functioning of the network:

• Lack of collaboration / coordination between the teams
• The rapid pace of change in the cloud and the orchestration of dynamic resources means that the documentation is not generally updated to solve problems
• Troubleshooting takes time as it often correlates data between multiple devices and toolsets and requires manual processes to achieve reliable diagnoses
• Many different tools from different vendors used may require staff to work with different technologies, low-level utilities and command-line interfaces (CLI)
• Problems arise and then disappear when all the information is needed for troubleshooting
• Climbing leaders is often necessary to evaluate the root causes

Network Operation best Practices 

Well-managed network management teams adopt a variety of proven best practices. These include, but are not limited to:

• Continuously monitor a wide range of information and network systems including communication circuits, cloud resources, LAN / WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls, and VoIP systems and application delivery.
• Provide a rapid response to all accidents, failures and performance problems.
• Classification of problems to be passed on to appropriate technical teams.
• Recognize, identify and prioritize incidents in accordance with customers' corporate requirements, organizational policies and operational impact.
• Collect and review performance reports for various systems and communicate performance trends to senior technical staff to help them predict future problems or outages.
• Document all actions in accordance with standard corporate policies and procedures.
• Notify customers and third-party service providers of problems, outages and repair status.
• Collaborate with internal and external technical and service teams to create and/or update knowledge base articles.
• Perform basic tests of systems and operating activities (installation of patches, network connectivity tests, execution of scripts, etc.).
• Support for several technical teams in 24/7 operating environments with high availability requirements. Various shift times can include daytime or evening hours.

In this list of best practices, the staff is more likely to focus on network performance today than application availability. But application availability and performance are essential to achieve the business objectives of companies and service providers. Moving applications to the cloud will be the main driver of network operations, spending more time on application availability and performance in the future. More specifically, network operations teams will need to ensure that internal and external networks and services do not prevent application availability, but rather speed up their delivery.

Network Intelligence technology faces many challenges associated with pursuing the best network operational practices. To ensure optimal network and application performance, network operations teams need detailed and accurate visibility of the network path, as well as routing and application layer data.

IoT Managed Services Role in the Enterprise IoT Evolution

  Managed IT Services is ready to help companies in various ways, from building and managing the entire network to helping them tackle specific projects, such as the move to 3G extinction.

IoT is no longer just the domain of the first users. It also means that multiple companies can undertake IoT implementations without fully understanding what lies ahead. Many are faced with decisions about how to integrate IoT architectures into their existing network environments, how to continue managing those architectures, the devices that connect to them and the applications that run them.

The IT staff of companies have faced many similar decisions in the past when implementing new technologies, deciding whether they want to be involved in creating or managing solutions or asking for help from managed service providers. who can do anything for them? MSPs can help you with everything related to planning, purchasing hardware and software, building architectures and managing your networks and services over the long term.

MSPs have been important business partners for decades, helping them through the evolution of connectivity, security and cloud computing technologies. The latest evolution that companies are looking for MSP support is the evolution of IoT.

"There has been a change in philosophy from the belief that IoT is as simple as getting a data plan and connecting hardware," said Chris Baird, CEO of OptConnect, a communications company. Kaysville, Utah, which provided managed services. for many years and officially launched an offer of IoT managed services at the recent IoT World Conference and Expo 2019 in Santa Clara, California. "If you think about how large the IoT is for businesses and everything they need to start, it can be difficult for many companies to bring together different parts of the entire IoT solution."

The IoT managed services the market is growing rapidly, according to Persistence Market Research. The market, which includes services such as infrastructure management, network management, device management, security management, and data management, by the way, will be worth over $ 94 billion by 2026, with a compound annual growth rate of over 20% between 2018 and 2026, an estimated PMR 2018 study.

Different Needs

Ultimately, there are many reasons why a company can choose a managed IoT service provider. The most obvious is that they lack the knowledge and experience to do the job effectively and profitably on their own.

Steve Garrett, OptConnect product manager said that with a growing interest in IoT, many companies are just starting to explore it "are completely ignorant and have no idea how to connect their equipment." These are the companies that are likely to need a fully managed service solution, covering everything from sensor hardware to connectivity, security, network monitoring and potentially more.

Other companies, said Garrett, "know the IoT and are trying to rebuild it. They could try to make the decision to create or buy and realize that there is simply too much choice. An MSP can help a company at this point. , managing parts of the IoT construction or managing aspects of the IoT architecture that the company decides not to manage on its own.

Garrett said companies that are very knowledgeable about IoT and advanced enough in their IoT travel, however, may find themselves forced to migrate a self-managed architecture to a third-party managed service. "We have customers who have distributed from 4,000 to 5,000 cell sites, who are overwhelmed and have learned that they can no longer grow their business. We have passed many of these portfolios and transferred them to our services."

For some companies, the need for managed IoT services may not be due to a lack of knowledge, but to more practical Managed Business Services, such as a lack of budget to distribute IoT equipment. These companies may find it more advantageous to pay the IoT as current operating expenses than to allocate a much larger budget for both the initial capital expenditures involved in the distribution of the IoT.

But not all companies may need a "nut soup" Managed Service Support, as Garrett described. Some companies may simply not have enough team members with specific skills to manage an aspect of IoT management, such as connectivity, security, data analysis or device management. In these cases, an MSP can manage this sore spot instead of everything. For example, OptConnect, which focuses largely on cellular technology for IoT connectivity can focus on managing a company's connections to different cellular providers without being more deeply involved in the company's internal IoT architecture if that's all that's needed,