Finding NOC specialists with the requisite domain expertise is a massive challenge that gets harder each day as competition for specialized talent grows. Developing an operational framework on which to run the NOC is its own under-appreciated project that requires exceptionally specialized experience that can be difficult to find in the labor market.
This talent specialization is critical to ensuring the NOC can effectively navigate all the operational challenges that impede its success and flexibility. Operational blindspots—the things you don’t know you don’t know—are a frustratingly common tripping point that can have far-reaching consequences for a NOC and the business.
The modern NOC engineer needs a variety of skills to keep your network, infrastructure, and applications up and running. Diverse technical knowledge, including knowledge of various network technologies, cloud environments, server operating systems, virtualization, storage systems, and applications, is becoming more and more essential—and harder to find—each day. This demand for skilled human resources in a 24x7 environment can pose a considerable and often insurmountable challenge for many organizations.
In addition to these core skills, tech innovations demand new ones. Machine learning and artificial intelligence in particular pose new challenges that don’t always lend themselves to time-tested best practices. Even many seasoned NOC engineers haven’t dealt with networks becoming more “aware” of the traffic that runs through them. Developing skills that complement machine learning is just one example of the evolving challenges that those who work in the NOC will need to overcome.
Understanding the required skillset early on can help you identify the correct staff to hire and drive the selection of tools to manage the infrastructure over time. In addition, a rigorous, ongoing knowledge management and training program is important to ensure the entire NOC team is up to date on all changes made to the supported infrastructure.
When the NOC isn’t thoughtfully operationalized around specific challenges, it has almost certainly signed itself up for stressful and expensive problem-solving down the road (not to mention unhappy end-users and customers).
One of the biggest reasons teams outsource their NOC to us is the capability that comes with plugging into an already-mature operation and access to niche NOC expertise. Between planning a NOC build, hiring a team, training that team, and aligning over the operational plan, in-house NOCs can expect 16 to 24 weeks minimum before all the parts are even in place. It can then take months or years to gain confident control over the system and bring it into a state of real operational maturity.
Turning up support with INOC condenses all that time and effort into just a few weeks—often far more cost-effectively. Our service bundles support, onboarding, tools integration, and many other competencies into a convenient support package at a fraction of the cost of bringing these services in-house. You get end-to-end support powered by NOC teams that excel in each area of support, both inside and outside the NOC.
The INOC Team encompasses all of these roles and functions, giving you a complete support package from initial service transition to close-knit customer experience management (and everything in between).
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