The Problem
Many NOCs aren’t designed to be scalable; that is, able to handle a growing amount of work as the company grows without compromising the level of service.
Typically, business plans include initial funding, sales and marketing, system build-out, operations support, and the business guidance needed to meet the projected growth. What business plans sometimes don’t take into consideration are predictable growth and process planning.
Often, for example, sales for a company take off, with key managers focused on new clients and getting technical services delivered to meet service launch dates. The same technical and operations resources are then tasked with the ongoing support of these services, severely impeding the organization’s ability to manage its growth. The result is predictable: customer dissatisfaction.
The ability to grow or absorb expansion requires careful consideration of the following factors:
- Staffing — It is essential to measure the staff utilization percentage derived from various NOC activities. Keeping this below 80% allows the NOC to absorb growth while allowing enough lead time for recruiting additional resources.
- Systems and network — A distributed redundant architecture allows for systems to grow and expand. The ability to easily deploy additional server resources on demand is important in order to handle sudden spikes in growth. The performance of the systems and network (bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc.) needs to be monitored closely to make sure there is enough capacity to handle growth.
- Tools — The tools used by the NOC (e.g., monitoring tools, ticketing systems, knowledge base) to deliver the service must have additional capacity built into them for the projected growth. It is not uncommon for tool performance to reduce dramatically if tools are not designed for growth that results in service-level degradation and loss in productivity.
- Process standardization and training — A consistent process framework and methodology for delivering high-quality service is one of the key features of a scalable NOC. Management should choose and adopt a process standard that fits their product and industry needs. NOC staff can then be trained to follow the established company standards.
How We Solve It
Outsourcing your NOC support to INOC offers a level of scalability that simply wouldn't be feasible in-house. Our shared NOC support model—which utilizes a timely and reliable resource pool that is constantly triaging and working through queues containing tickets from many clients—enables organizations to benefit from economies of scale.
Rather than being limited to a set number of dedicated resources, shared support works in multiple client environments through assignments that commit them to a particular environment at any one time. This offers a reasonable level of flexibility to absorb varying workloads and the option to scale service up or down to meet fluctuating support demands.
Outsourcing NOC support to a provider with an operationally mature NOC not only frees up precious in-house resources to work on more revenue-generating projects but puts the people, process, and platform elements in place to meet and exceed the service levels demanded of your end-users or customers.
The net result is almost always the same: a reduction in overall operational costs, the metrics to manage those costs, and, in most cases, significantly improved performance.
In short, teams that outsource NOC support to INOC get the unique ability to receive as much or as little support as they need so their can better utilize their own IT resources—all while protecting their business and meeting or exceeding desired service levels.
