Most companies rely heavily on the performance and availability of their computing environment. Poor performance and unavailable systems typically result in disgruntled customers, lost revenue, and reduced internal productivity.
However, it’s also challenging for small and mid-sized companies to devote the necessary resources to keep such environments running smoothly.
After all, who really has the time and budget available to handle everything themselves? Fortunately, reliable solutions exist to keep your business running smoothing, without breaking the bank.
A managed network operations center (NOC) can reduce these challenges by providing improved performance, availability, and peace of mind.
Let’s take a look how it works, and why a managed NOC remains a solution you’ll want to consider.
What Is a Network Operations Center?
A network operations center (NOC) is a centralized location in which a team of IT administrators supervise, monitor, and support a telecom network or a computing environment.
Because of this centralization, it only takes a small (but experienced) group of professionals to handle a large and diverse enterprise computing environment.
The NOC provides visibility into all infrastructure components, enabling support teams to address issues before they become business-impacting problems. Technicians can also remotely perform maintenance activities to ensure that system performance and availability goals are met.
How an NOC Helps Your Business
Even though an NOC provides critical services, not all organizations have the resources to implement one.
In those instances, the IT team is engaged to provide ad-hoc support to address issues and perform routine maintenance.
However, engaging a third-party NOC to augment your IT staff provides multiple benefits, such as:
Reduced downtime – Twenty-four-hour monitoring enables identification and addressing of issues immediately, reducing your downtime. This reduction in downtime results in greater internal productivity and increased customer satisfaction – both critical to the success of your business.
Reduced operating cost – Working with a third-party NOC reduces operating costs by leveraging the provider’s IT talent, rather than hiring extra internal support personnel. You gain all the skills and expertise, but without all the expense.
Increased protection from cyberattacks – The IT professionals staffing an NOC have experience identifying potential threats and cyberattacks. They can help prevent an attack from proliferating through your environment and minimize any damage.
Backup management – An NOC can be responsible for backup management that ensure systems are adequately protected. Problems with overnight backups can be addressed promptly, so there is no impact on your production windows.
System maintenance – Keeping systems updated and patched remains an essential part of keeping them secure. NOCs can assist with patch management and ensure that administrative scripts and procedures designed to install patches run correctly.
Time savings – A third-party NOC saves your IT team time otherwise spent chasing down easily-addressed issues. This allows your internal team to concentrate on value-added projects that help grow your business.
Reporting on demand – Some NOCs offer reporting capabilities designed to inform you of the overall health of your environment. This enables you to understand where additional resources would better suit your goals.
Outside Help Managing Your NOC
An NOC is a critical component of any operation. But, as mentioned earlier, not every organization can afford, or even truly benefit from, a dedicated in-house team.
Fortunately, an alternative solution exists: outsourcing your needs to a third-party NOC provider.
If you’re considering making the move, Ideal Integrations, along with the support of our cybersecurity division Blue Bastion, can help.
We offer customers a fully managed network operations center solution, customized to suit any need and budget.
We’ll monitor your network and server environments using industry-leading tools to ensure stability, security, and peace of mind. You’ll receive notifications of any problems that arise, while our team immediately starts escalation procedures.
Our NOC team covers your infrastructure 24/7/365, so you’re never surprised by a problem or outage. Our team provides availability monitoring, issue remediation, and patch & backup management.
Are you ready to get started? If so, simply contact us at 412-349-6680, or fill out the form below, and let our security and IT experts will gladly outline your options and best solutions.
Are you ready elevate your business?