Predictive Technology, Inc.’s Network Operations Center is a state of the art communication facility providing fully managed services of all critical and non-critical events within your facility.
Downtime is not an option for our customers! They rely on our Operations Center to manage alarms from mission critical equipment and immediately begin contacting the customer and/or maintenance provider with the goal of restoring normal operations to the system. The PTI NOC is centrally located and provides multiple layers of redundancy in power, network, and phone systems. In case of a disaster the facility is re-locatable instantly to a backup Five 9’s Facility.
What is a NOC
A Network Operations Center, often called a NOC (pronounced “knock”), is typically a centralized location where the network operation staff provides 24x7x365 supervision, monitoring, and management of the network, servers, databases, firewalls, devices and related external services. This infrastructure environment may be located on-premises and/or with a cloud-based provider.
Network Operations refers to the activities performed by internal networking staff or third parties that companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage, and respond to alerts on their network’s availability and performance. Staff that have primary responsibilities for network operations are often called network operations analysts or network operations engineers.
Key Network Operation activities are:
- Network monitoring
- Incident response
- Communications management (Email, voice, & video)
- Performance, quality, and optimization reporting
- Software/firmware installation, troubleshooting and updating of network elements
- Patch management
- Backup and storage
- Firewall management
- Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and other security tool deployment and monitoring, in collaboration with Security Operations
- Threat analysis and blast radius analysis in collaboration with Security Operations
Challenges Facing Network Operations
Because of the complexities involved with today’s networks and services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, there are many challenges that network operations staff face not only associated with having a thorough understanding of the technology itself, but in maintaining streamlined communications access between all those involved.
Some key network operation challenges include:
- Lack of collaboration/coordination across teams
- Fast pace of change in the cloud and dynamic resource orchestration means that documentation is usually not up-to-date for troubleshooting problems
- Troubleshooting is time consuming because it often involves correlating data across multiple devices and tool sets and requires manual processes to arrive at sound diagnoses
- Many disparate tools from different vendors in use that may require staff work with different technologies, low-level utilities and Command Line Interfaces (CLI)
- Problems arise and then disappear by the time all information is collected that is necessary for troubleshooting
- Escalation to more senior staff is required frequently to assess root causes
