The role of the NOC

Bear in mind that the goal of the NOC—also known as the NMC, or network management centre—is to supervise, operate, and maintain the network and security infrastructure, based on the company’s needs. The following are among its main tasks:

• Administering and supervising the IP network, which includes all technological equipment, such as servers, switches, routers, firewalls, desktop and laptop computers, storage systems, IP surveillance, and any other device with an IP address
• Producing activity reports
• Managing backups
• Implementing and controlling the architecture

What makes a NOC effective

Here are some of the characteristics of a good NOC:

• An effective NOC controls the IT infrastructure in real time, detects problems and observes their status changes thanks to its diagnostic tools. In practice, each network device connects to a central manager at fixed intervals to provide essential statistics about its status. This is a proactive way of ensuring that problems with the network are detected, reported and resolved before they can have a significant impact on the company. This is often done through a ticketing system when it comes to managing problems not identified or resolved upstream.
• To constantly maximize uptime, the NOC monitors the network’s availability status. It usually has a log storage, analysis and reporting system, and can generate availability reports.
• It assists administrators on first request.
• It allows the technical staff in charge to maintain the integrity of the data during transfers between the user and the database.
• It generates activity reports from the collected data thanks to its data collection and measurement tools.
• It integrates expert recommendations on possible improvements.

To optimize its efficiency, the NOC must therefore possess several levels of redundancy in terms of physical infrastructure, logical security and access control, as well as software that makes it possible to monitor the network with precision. It also requires a high level of expertise and an understanding of the various technological platforms. A good Network Operations Centre is essential to keeping a network functioning at its maximum capacity.