Managed NOC Services

Overview

A network operations center, or NOC (pronounced "knock"), is a centralized location where IT technicians directly support the efforts of remote monitoring and management software (RMM). NOC teams are widely used in the managed IT services space and represent an excellent service delivery engine for many Managed NOC Service providers (MSPs).

These technical teams keep an eye on the endpoints that monitor and manage, independently resolve the problems that arise and take preventive measures to prevent many problems from occurring. The NOC teams are also heavily involved in a high-level security actions and backup and disaster recovery (BDR) activities, ensuring 24x7x365 availability for MSP customers.

What are the Roles and Responsibilities of a NOC Technician?

NOC engineers and technicians are responsible for monitoring the health, safety, and capacity of the infrastructure in the customer's environment. They make decisions and adaptations to ensure optimal network performance and organizational productivity.

When an MSP action or intervention is required, NOC technicians can create alarms (or "tickets") that identify and classify the problem based on severity, type of alert and other criteria. Depending on the relationship between NOC and MSP, technical teams can then work together to resolve the problem (and identify its root cause to avoid future problems).

Technicians are classified according to "levels", which indicate the severity and difficulty of the problems they manage. The levels are numbered 1 (easier to solve problems, minor problems) and increase their ability to more complicated computer problems. For example, in the event of a hardware failure, a warning can be assigned to a level 1 technician at first. However, after further inspection, if the problem exceeds the defective hardware, the ticket can be passed to a technician. level 2 or 3.

NOC technicians are constantly looking for anomalous network activities, making technical changes and can mobilize extensive resources - some that would be rarely used by an internal IT service provider - to respond to emergency situations.

Additional NOC features include:

• Application software installations, troubleshooting, and updating
• Mail management services
• Backup and archiving management
• Network survey and evaluations
• Application of the policy
• Monitoring and management of firewalls and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)
• Antivirus scan and fix
• Patch management and whitelist
• Analysis of shared threats
• Optimization and reporting on quality of service
• Voice and video traffic management
• Performance reports and recommendations for improvement