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Everything the modern MSP and system integrator needs to know to cost-effectively access 24x7 NOC services and unlock new revenue in 2024 and beyond.
Forward-thinking MSPs and SIs are standing before expansive market opportunities. The technologies making their way into the enterprise and the mid-market require experts who can integrate complicated multi-vendor systems and navigate the sometimes dizzying and fraught reality of digital transformation.
As the steady migration to the cloud continues, the explosion of demand for Managed Services has driven a healthy ecosystem of vendors and strategic partners eager to integrate with SIs and MSPs to meet that demand. But despite the rise in vendors and partners, there’s a notable lack of options in a critical area: high-quality 24x7 Network Operations Center (NOC) capability.
An effective, operationally mature NOC is the foundation of any MSP successfully serving enterprise and mid-market customers today. But earning the description of “effective” and “operationally mature” is neither easy nor cheap. For most MSPs, the high costs, operational experience, long lead times, and practical challenges that stand in the way of delivering efficient enterprise-level support feel frustrated at what otherwise could be a competitive value-add for customers.
MSPs therefore need a NOC partner that brings the experience of implementing and integrating monitoring and ITSM tools, advanced technical support capabilities, and deep operational expertise to handle these heavy customer support workloads better and at a fraction of the cost of utilizing their internal technical resources. Whether you call it “NOC outsourcing,” “NOC white-labeling,” “managed NOC services,” or “NOC-as-a-Service,” accessing NOC services through a dedicated, mature NOC provider simply makes the most business and practical sense given the costs, complexity, and lead-time involved with standing up a NOC internally.
This guide briefly lays out:
If you prefer to download a PDF copy of this guide, you can request one here.
If you’re interested in learning more about joining other MSPs accessing 24x7 services through the INOC VISION Partner Program, we’d love to talk. Get in touch with us using the partner form on our website.
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It’s challenging and often cost-prohibitive to hire the niche NOC expertise needed to stand up a NOC, let alone operationalize it to efficiently handle the torrent of support issues customers will bring to it.
Any enterprise MSP that attempts to take on 24x7 NOC support as part of their offering without this requisite expertise and operational maturity ends up in a predictable scenario: Customer support activities steal valuable time from their company’s technical resources and cost the business both financially and in lost opportunities. Rather than focusing on the strategic, revenue-generating projects those resources should be devoted to, they stay distracted with mostly Tier 1 customer support work.
In time, these over-utilized resources turn into burned-out resources. Instead of celebrating the launch of profitable new growth projects, the organization is plunged into a state of constant stress as they deal with the daily anxieties of employee turnover, chronic operational headaches, and dissatisfied customers.
To enable 24x7 NOC support for your managed service offering while avoiding this all-too-common scenario, you need a NOC that’s both capable of delivering advanced 24x7 enterprise and mid-market support and efficient enough to handle a high volume of support activities across multiple customers—all without burdening your own technical team.
Given the costs, lead time, and operational challenges of acquiring the talent and tools—and reaching the operational maturity needed to deliver high-quality 24x7 NOC support consistently—it makes practical sense to approach NOC services like any other integrated sub-system; that is, partnering with a NOC services provider already armed with the expertise and operational maturity to unlock the full potential of your Managed Services offering without the added expenses, risks, and round-the-clock operational headaches of going it alone.
Read our other guide that de-tangles the terms "NOC managed services" and "outsourced NOC support": NOC Managed Services vs. Outsourced NOC Support
Despite such high demand for enterprise-level NOC support out in the market, many SIs and MSPs struggle to find a NOC partner that can bring the operational chops needed to deliver the support enterprise customers need. Building a NOC can be hard enough. Refining its operation and super-charging its capabilities to take on multiple enterprise customers is simply beyond the scope of investment for most savvy MSPs.
Consider, for a moment, the typical NOC’s capabilities and operational sophistication relative to the needs your enterprise customers would place on it.
Or consider the second component we mentioned: eliminating the burden on your staff.
Without a reliable NOC partner that can rise to these and all the other challenges of enterprise support, service providers not interested in the chaos of delivering 24x7 NOC support find themselves shut off from otherwise addressable markets and locked out of significant revenue opportunities with existing clients.
We launched the INOC VISION Partner Program to solve this very problem. Partnering SIs and MSPs are accessing and deploying those high-demand NOC services and finally seizing the opportunities that had been frustratingly out of reach.
Rather than burdening their technical resources with important but distracting NOC support work, they’re simply integrating our world-class NOC operation as a kind of “operational sub-system” into their Managed Services offering—seamlessly delivering world-class NOC support with practically limitless resources.
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As mentioned before, many MSPs just don’t have the bandwidth to distract their technical team with 24x7 NOC support activities. They also don’t have years to search for rare NOC talent, build out a sophisticated platform to support a large and diverse client book, and develop niche competencies themselves—nor should they most of the time.
Our VISION Partner Program offers a way to circumvent these challenges entirely. It condenses months or years of lead time into weeks. Service providers side-step enormous expenses to simply integrate and deploy our industry-leading NOC platform and the rare operational expertise it has spent over 20 years developing and refining—just like any other sub-system.
Rather than burdening technical staff in the short term—and taking on significant CAPEX and spending months or years operationalizing a NOC in the long term—VISION Partners quickly tap into our service catalog and deep operational expertise, getting all of the training, tools, and support they need to meet customers’ technology support challenges and accelerate profitability right now.
To paint an even more complete picture of the opportunities partnership offers to MSPs, consider just a few areas of expertise we’ve developed over the years to deliver successful NOC support to some of the most demanding enterprises worldwide.
For each, ask yourself what the smarter business decision for your organization would be: invest in developing these competencies and capabilities in-house or simply partner with an existing NOC to start deploying them immediately.
Without a tiered support framework to properly manage workflow, a NOC taking on support for multiple enterprise clients will almost certainly be overwhelmed by the “wall of red.” The NOC should prioritize and organize issues into a set of queues, each of which can be handled by the appropriate group.
We’ve spent years developing and refining a robust support framework around ITIL best practices. Our approach to NOC operations is so effective at organizing and enhancing support that we typically reduce high-tier support activities by 60% or more, often as much as 90%.
Our structured NOC radically transforms where and how support activities are managed—both by tier and category.
In a matter of months, the value of an effective support framework becomes abundantly clear as support activities steadily migrate to their appropriate tiers, lightening the load on your advanced engineers while working and resolving issues faster and more effectively.
The tiered IT support structure can effectively resolve 65% of incidents at the Tier 1 level and escalate advanced issues to specialized IT staff. This enables the support group to handle the events, service requests, and incidents at the appropriate tier while achieving resolution as quickly as possible. Learn more »
Especially in enterprise environments where incidents and events need to be correlated across perhaps three, four, or five different monitoring platforms, successfully supporting multiple enterprise clients requires the advanced analysis and interpretation capabilities only AIOps can offer.
We’re so far the only NOC support provider applying powerful AIOps capabilities to the NOC operations environment—consolidating and correlating data from disparate systems and providing remarkable intelligence for better, faster support. Learn more »
INOC's Ops 3.0 Platform is transforming NOC service delivery. Ops 3.0 is the third major iteration of our NOC service platform, serving as a comprehensive operating system for technology, operations, and service delivery. It enhances NOC service delivery by automating alarm feed ingestion, correlation, and ticketing, increasing accuracy and speed while minimizing human delays.
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Wondering if VISION Partnership is a fit for your organization? Below, we highlight four common NOC challenges MSPs contend with and explain how partnering with us can help you close those gaps, capture new business, and hit your business goals.
If you find yourself nodding along with any of these challenges, we’re likely a fit! Express your interest using our partner form. We'll schedule a time to explore your challenges more in-depth and discuss how our partner program can be configured to provide a NOC solution.
“We’re struggling to support our customers’ increasingly complex multi-technology, multi-vendor networks, and infrastructures.”
If you serve enterprise customers, this may be a familiar situation: Customers continue to add new technologies and vendors to their already complex and interconnected IT infrastructures. The bigger and more complex their environments get, the more your organization is challenged to support them. Your valuable technical resources are increasingly pulled away from critical projects to deal with customer support activities.
At some point, you may face a problem: It’s simply too costly to hire, train, and manage additional high-end resources to support all your clients’ potential technology manufacturers—especially if for only one particular manufacturer or to satisfy one customer’s specific needs.
The INOC VISION partnership provides immediate access to a deep bench of experienced technical resources that enable you to meet your current customers’ growing support demands while expanding your addressable market without burdening your existing technical staff or taking on additional capital expense and overhead of additional personnel.
What would otherwise be a major up-front capital investment to expand your managed services offering becomes an operational expense that can be managed flexibly as you grow.
With INOC’s advanced support resources as a direct extension of your own services, you can confidently address any of your current or prospective customers’ support needs—a level of service that puts many SIs and MSPs far ahead of their competitors in the particularly high-growth markets.
“Simply monitoring our customers’ networks isn’t enough. We need comprehensive technical support capabilities 24x7.”
These days, enterprise companies expect a comprehensive support service that goes well beyond monitoring. They need efficient, real-time support management to keep IT operations up and running at peak performance around the clock. SIs are increasingly expected to understand the complex operational challenges that are keeping teams up at night and come prepared with a service catalog that takes on all or some of that work to meet service level requirements.
Supporting clients at this level, 24x7 requires a team of costly resources that must be available overnight and on weekends.
Partnering with INOC, you get access to dedicated experienced technical resources 24x7 to resolve technical issues—all backed by SLAs that you can trust to provide you (and your customers) with peace of mind.
“We need access to senior technical resources who aren’t typically available after business hours or during peak times.”
Until recently, you may not have seen the advanced Tier 2 or 3 utilization rates at a point that justified a larger team. But if you’re like other service providers, that’s changing. Higher resource utilization or a shift in when resources are needed can necessitate a larger team working more hours throughout the week.
But finding and hiring senior support experts is hard (and expensive) enough. Accessing these resources after business hours simply isn’t financially or practically feasible unless the support required is the majority of your business.
Because we designed and built INOC specifically as a 24x7 NOC, it has abundant access to technical resources no matter what time of day. We’ve structured and operationalized our NOC specifically to accommodate all types of support, even specialized support during off-hours.
VISION Partners circumvent enormous hiring challenges and get convenient access to whoever they need—whenever and wherever they need them.
“Our customers are asking us to help them improve their existing NOC operations and/or provide that 24x7 support for them.”
Enterprise customers that already have a NOC frequently look to an SI for help improving it operationally. They may want to improve its efficiency and effectiveness by, for example, giving it structure and improving its processes. Other times, there is no NOC, but one is sorely needed.
Many SIs and MSPs struggle to address both of these customer requests. Assessing and improving a NOC operation takes a level of expertise many service providers simply don’t have. Since it’s not a core competency, there’s simply no need to bring such a resource in-house. In the latter case, service providers may simply lack the NOC support capabilities customers need.
INOC’s services—and their extension through partnerships—address both needs. Our NOC experts can provide consulting services to assess support requirements, analyze gaps, and draw on operational best practices to provide structure, define workflows, and provide full operational visibility for an existing NOC.
We also step in to fill the 24x7 NOC support gap—providing comprehensive outsourced NOC services, from initial setup to 24×7 support to post-event analysis and reporting. Partnering SIs and MSPs can address customers’ end-to-end needs, from equipment supply to maintenance/field support to 24x7 monitoring and problem resolution along with help desk services.
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Check out the client case study and partner use cases below to see how VISION Partners are achieving meaningful results for themselves and their customers.
Co-Founder/CEO, INOC
Co-Founder/President/COO, INOC
Director of Business Development, INOC
Director of Advanced Technical Services, INOC