What are managed NOC services?

Managed NOC services, also known as outsourced NOC services, combine advanced support processes, cutting-edge technologies, and expert teams to ensure seamless network and infrastructure operations. They’re a critical enabler for businesses, offering the same essential functions as in-house NOCs—without the overhead.

For organizations that find the cost of building and maintaining a 24x7 NOC prohibitive, outsourcing to a specialized managed NOC provider offers both an economic advantage and operational necessity. These providers leverage economies of scale to deliver cost-effective, high-quality IT system support that’s often unattainable in-house.

A word about terminology

It's important to recognize that whenever we use the term "managed service" in IT, it often invites a misleading interpretation of what we're discussing here. Traditionally, IT "managed services" refer to selling or licensing equipment, deploying it, and providing ongoing management of those tools. When people hear "managed services," they typically envision this standardized, tool-focused model.

However, that's not what we mean when we refer to "managed NOC services" or "NOC managed services." We're not selling NOC tools to another company and then helping them manage those tools, as a traditional managed service provider might with desktops, network equipment, or other IT systems.

Instead, we're using these terms interchangeably with "outsourced NOC support" or "NOC services"—an operational partnership where NOC services are delivered directly from the provider's NOC. Rather than just managing tools from afar, the provider actually becomes or augments your NOC team. Here at INOC, for example, we integrate with virtually any ITOps/ITSM/NOC toolset—standard or bespoke. Events and alerts flow in where we analyze and handle the incidents.

This approach is a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to building a NOC internally. Providers use their own or your tools, processes, and expertise to comprehensively manage your infrastructure.

This model is particularly well-suited for enterprises and service providers that require cost-effective, scalable, and deeply integrated 24/7 support without the overhead and complexity of running an in-house NOC.

The best managed NOC service providers don’t just monitor systems—they bring optimized processes, expert personnel, and purpose-built platforms to deliver exceptional results.

Why are companies opting for managed NOC services?

Organizations can either build their own NOC or outsource the function to a managed service provider. Increasingly, outsourcing has become the smarter choice for businesses looking to:

• Reduce Costs: Eliminate the need to hire, train, and retain in-house staff.
• Leverage Expertise: Gain access to specialized knowledge and skills.
• Improve Efficiency: Tap into advanced platforms and refined processes.
• Ensure Scalability: Adapt to changing needs without overinvesting in resources

To give you a sense of the sophistication you can find in a modern NOC support partner, here's our own VP of Technology, Jim Martin, explaining the mechanics of our support platform—Ops 3.0:

INOC Ops 3.0

The tools and systems a managed NOC uses directly impact its ability to provide fast, accurate, and consistent service. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in INOC Ops 3.0, the latest evolution of our operating platform.

Ops 3.0 integrates technology, operations, and service delivery into one seamless system. It processes alarm feeds from various sources, auto-correlates events into unified tickets, and presents them through a single dashboard for efficient incident, problem, and capacity management.

This means our team resolves issues faster and more accurately—freeing NOC engineers to focus on strategic client projects rather than repetitive tasks. The result? A more reliable infrastructure for your business, with fewer delays and disruptions.

Backing up: what is a NOC in 2025?

A Network Operations Center (NOC) is the command center for monitoring and managing an organization’s IT infrastructure, including servers, applications, cloud environments, routers, switches, circuits, and more. Unlike a Help Desk, which supports end-user issues, a NOC handles the technical backbone of your operations—ensuring uptime, resolving events in real-time, and maintaining the health of your network.

Key NOC functions include:

• 24x7 Monitoring: Constant visibility into your network’s status.
• Incident Detection & Resolution: Immediate response to issues before they escalate.
• Vendor Coordination: Direct interaction with equipment and carrier providers.
• Capacity Planning: Ensuring your infrastructure supports current and future demands.

Why do companies outsource their NOC operation?

Outsourcing NOC operations to a specialized provider offers a smarter, more reliable way to manage and monitor networks and infrastructure. It transforms a traditionally high-cost, high-maintenance function into a streamlined, value-generating operation.

Here’s why organizations choose to outsource their NOC in 2025:

The tiers of managed NOC services

Not all NOC support providers deliver the same services, but depending on the company, NOC service providers typically provide support across each traditional Tier or level, 1, 2, and 3.

How does pricing work?

There are two primary pricing models for outsourced NOC service: fixed per-device pricing and adaptive operational pricing based on activity level over time.

• Fixed per-device pricing is exactly what it sounds like. Devices are either categorized and priced by type, or, more generally, as a total number of “devices” or “nodes.”
• Adaptive operational activity pricing is a more sophisticated pricing model that determines pricing based on the actual NOC activity levels measured across your supported infrastructure over time.

While the number of devices requiring monitoring and support is always a critical factor when pricing NOC service, in our view, it’s often an overly simplistic long-term pricing factor to be used on its own, except in specific circumstances.

Especially for companies outsourcing to avoid what would be an expensive, underutilized in-house NOC, adapting flat, all-inclusive service pricing that tracks with activity levels can significantly lower the overall cost of service while retaining the ability to project costs as you would with totally fixed per-device pricing.

Unlike traditional models that charge per alarm or port, INOC’s primary pricing method revolves around customization. Our approach considers the unique aspects of your infrastructure:

1. Number of Devices: How many assets need monitoring and support?
2. Activity Levels: Known or projected ticket volumes drive cost efficiency.
3. Integration Requirements: The complexity of connecting your systems with our platform.

We begin with an initial service price based on these factors and adjust over time according to actual usage. This ensures you’re always paying for what you need—nothing more, nothing less.

Here's a simple way to see what model is best for you:

Device-Based Pricing: Costs are calculated based on the number and type of devices (or “nodes”) requiring support. It's simple and predictable, but best for organizations with consistently high activity levels.

Adaptive Activity-Based Pricing: Costs align with your actual service usage. Ideal for businesses with fluctuating network activity or lower NOC utilization. Pricing starts with an initial estimate and is fine-tuned quarterly based on ticket volumes and changes in your environment.

What are the various NOC support models available?

Support models may look different from one service provider to another. Here at INOC, our NOC support clients receive service through one of four models depending on their needs or desired service arrangement:

Despite being such a foundational component of the technical support operation that keeps organizations running, many NOCs, in both the service provider and enterprise markets, fail to deliver the desired service levels while consuming significant management and financial resources.

By far the biggest cause of this failure is the lack of any authoritative blueprint for the NOC to follow—a documented framework that establishes clear, standardized rules that govern how the NOC team should operate.

Since no two organizations share the same business strategies, technology infrastructures, tools, or service requirements, the factors that make a NOC successful or unsuccessful are different for each organization. Therefore, each NOC deserves its own operational blueprint that takes into account the specific conditions and requirements that pertain to it.

Although the lack of this operational blueprint is the most common root cause of most NOC problems, it’s certainly not the only one. We briefly summarize the ten NOC challenges we see most often below. 

Challenge #1: Overutilized technology staff and exploding support costs due to a lack of a tiered organizational structure to manage workflows

This is the operational blueprint we just mentioned. Failing to organize NOC activities and subsequent workflows by technology and skill level is one of the biggest hurdles in building a successful NOC. When a NOC can’t manage its workflow, it often finds itself overwhelmed by the “wall of red.”

A tiered operational support structure enables managers to leverage the lower-cost first-level or Tier 1 team to perform routine activities and free up higher-level or Tier 2 and 3 technical teams to focus on more advanced support issues.

The figure below lays out the basics of tiered NOC support structure. Central to this structure is the Tier 1 team that uses monitoring tools and interacts with end-user help desks, Tier 2 and 3 engineers, and third parties. Information flows between the various entities within a well-defined process framework.

Issues coming into the NOC should also be prioritized and organized into a set of queues, each of which can be handled by the appropriate group. These can be organized by important variables such as service level agreements (SLAs), technologies, and technician skill levels.

The figure below shows how a set of issues can be broken up into queues and assigned to groups based on skillset.

These visuals are intended to be instructive in building a framework, but also in realizing the distance between what a NOC should have, and what it actually might have. Especially in NOCs supporting enterprises or communication service providers, the further operations are from a structure like this, the more value it can expect to gain from implementing one.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of the relevant problem indicators here:

• Frequent miscommunication and confusion among team members
• Inefficient incident response times and resolution
• Inability to effectively manage and prioritize incidents
• Poor knowledge sharing and collaboration within the team
• High stress levels and burnout among NOC staff
  
  

Challenge #2: Blindness to issues and opportunities due to insufficient operational metrics

Anyone working in a NOC is likely to hear statements like these on a routine basis:

• “Why are we always busy?”
• “I feel like we can never catch up,” and
• “My coworkers are not pulling their weight.”

These sentiments are understandable given the fast-paced environment of a NOC and the constant multitasking that is required. Meaningful operational metrics are vital not only in running a successful NOC but also in keeping staff morale high.

In many NOCs, however, not only are important metrics not being measured—the ones that are being measured aren’t being evaluated on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. In the case of either or both problems, the early indicators of potential issues will almost certainly go ignored and allowed to evolve into more resource-intensive problems. 

For a quick self-evaluation on this point, consider whether you’re tracking first-call resolution, percentage of abandoned calls, mean time to restore, and number of tickets and calls handled. If you have blindspots in any of these areas, we can almost guarantee there’s an operational vulnerability affecting the NOC’s efficiency or effectiveness. Be aware, however, that this shortlist is by no means exhaustive. Even a brief consult with our Solutions Engineering Team typically reveals a number of metric gaps companies can put on their radar.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of the common problem indicators here:

• Difficulty in measuring and tracking NOC performance
• Inability to identify areas of improvement or inefficiencies
• Failure to correlate metrics with business outcomes
• Lack of clarity on the effectiveness of implemented changes
• Difficulty in setting and meeting performance targets
  
  

Challenge #3: High turnover, low morale, and difficulty in hiring, training, and retaining staff due to a lack of a staffing strategy

Great NOCs are a function of great people. But very often, the absence of both a support structure and a skills-based structure can handicap a company’s ability to attract and retain great talent.

Consider the overall activity of your NOC, including the volume of calls, emails, and alarms handled by hour-of-day, day-of-week, and type of support engineer, as well as the duration of incidents. This data should be translated into a working schedule for each type of support engineer needed to satisfy the staffing requirements of your NOC. In addition to using your utilization metrics, benefits, training, and employee growth plans should all be in place.

Read more about the costs, challenges, and key considerations of staffing a 24x7 NOC.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of the relevant problem indicators:

• High staff turnover rates
• Prolonged vacancies for skilled NOC professionals
• Inadequate training resources and knowledge transfer
• Low employee morale and job satisfaction
• Inability to keep up with industry advancements and best practices
  
  

Challenge #4: Inconsistent responsiveness to issues or difficulty troubleshooting due to poor/unstandardized process frameworks

A lack of consistency is one of the main reasons NOCs don’t perform at optimal levels.

The best way to achieve consistency is through a standardized process framework. Such a framework provides a NOC with a set of specific procedures for handling various support situations. There are several process and management frameworks to choose from, including MOF, FCAPS, and ITIL.

Process frameworks can be overwhelming when considered in their entirety, so it’s best to tackle areas that challenge the organization the most first. Usually, that’s incident management, problem management, and service desk.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of these problem indicators:

• Inconsistencies in processes and procedures
• Difficulty in onboarding and training new staff
• Increased likelihood of human error and miscommunication
• Poor overall network performance and stability
• Inability to effectively measure and improve processes
  
  

Challenge #5: A constant state of vulnerability due to a lack of a business continuity plan

Many NOCs simply don’t have a documented plan that outlines the functions of the business, identifies the critical systems that enable the organization to run, and prescribes specific actions to maintain these systems during a disruption. Others have a plan—perhaps limited to disaster recovery only—but don’t adequately protect against all potential disasters and disruptions.

For a quick gap assessment, consider the following essentials for a NOC business continuity plan against your own:

• Infrastructure redundancy: Regardless of whether your NOC’s data centers are physical or virtual, the disaster recovery plan should include at least two identical data centers running identical software with fully synchronized databases.
• Operational redundancy: An effective disaster recovery plan should also ensure that the NOC can continue to operate in the event of a site failure.
• Technical redundancy: Your NOC’s disaster recovery plan should also prepare for a major technical outage that poses a disaster-level threat to NOC service despite affecting only a portion of your facility. Consider scenarios like loss of a single server or network element, loss of much or all of the data center, and loss of a network link.

Challenge #6: Recurring problems and an inability to emerge out of a reactive state due to a lack of quality management

Without continuous quality assurance, NOCs risk hurting customer satisfaction and compromising their reputation. There are two components of quality management in this case: quality assurance and quality control.

A good quality control program monitors and measures primary aspects of the NOC service—the key performance indicators referenced earlier. These KPIs provide much-needed visibility into NOC support activity, responsiveness, and effectiveness. NOC management can use this information to ensure, for instance, that stated objectives for event-to-action times and first-level incident resolution are being met for each customer.

A good quality or service assurance program allows the NOC to identify and resolve problems before they impact customers or the business in a significant way. A quality assurance review begins when a customer reports dissatisfaction with any aspect of the NOC service. NOC management follows up with an internal review of the service—responsiveness metrics, adherence to runbook procedures, customer interaction, and technical troubleshooting, to name a few.

Such quantitative and qualitative measures and the resulting feedback lower the probability of the same problem recurring. Monthly and quarterly reviews of the service with stakeholders ensure that customer expectations continue to be met.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of these problem indicators:

• Inconsistent service levels and customer experience
• Inability to identify root causes and implement corrective actions
• Lack of a culture of continuous improvement
  
  

Challenge #7: Lots of data, but little actionable insight due to disparate tools and platforms

Especially among enterprises and communication service providers, the NOC has to be able to receive and process alarm or event information from multiple sources and present it in a single, consolidated view for staff to act on—a “single pane of glass.”

Without integration between these tools and platforms, NOC personnel are faced with tracking and managing multiple screens for event information; manually collecting information from multiple sources for the purposes of documentation, notification, and escalation; and then attempting to manage workflow toward service restoration. This makes it nearly impossible to monitor and report on SLA metrics, let alone optimize performance. The results inevitably include operational inefficiencies, missed SLAs, and undue stress on staff.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of these problem indicators:

• Inefficient troubleshooting and incident resolution
• Difficulty in monitoring and managing the entire network infrastructure
• Too much human error and miscommunication
• Challenges in sharing and accessing relevant information among team members
• Inability to provide a unified view of the network for decision-making

Challenge #8: Persistent operational problems due to out-of-date documentation and runbooks

Failure to build runbooks, document workflow processes, create structured databases for storage and retrieval of information, and record business results for later analysis and optimization will severely impede the ability of a NOC to function well over the long term. Too often, services are added and changes are made without proper documentation. This limits the ability of the NOC to resolve an issue when it arises.

Poor documentation often stems from a lack of resources and the expertise required to map out processes and create work instructions and documents. Instead, key people simply “know what to do” and new staff learn by “seeing and doing” alongside an experienced mentor.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of these problem indicators:

• Inconsistent problem-solving approaches among team members
• Difficulty in training and onboarding new staff
• Prolonged incident resolution times
• Increased likelihood of recurring issues
• Inability to retain and share knowledge within the team
  
  

Challenge #9: Business growth stymied due to a rigid, unscalable NOC

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. The ability to grow or absorb expansion requires careful consideration of staffing, systems and network, tools, process standardization, and training.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of these problem indicators:

• Frequent network bottlenecks and performance issues
• Inability to meet the demands of expanding customer base or service offerings
• Difficulty in adapting to new technologies or industry trends
• Inadequate resources to manage growth in network complexity
• Negative impact on customer satisfaction and business reputation
  
  

Challenge #10: Unreasonably high operational costs

There are several components that make up the cost of running a 24x7 NOC. Take staff for example. The staff required to support a 24x7 NOC include not only front-line technicians and engineers but also back-end support groups such as systems and network engineering, service transition, human resources, and customer advocacy. 

Resources also need to be allocated for training NOC staff when they are initially hired, as well as when onboarding new customers, and whenever changes are made to existing support or new technologies are introduced. Systems, network connectivity, and security controls need to be deployed in either a data center or the cloud to house the various tools and applications required by the NOC to operate. Resources for ongoing support need to be included.

All of these components present a formidable operating expense but have to be considered in building a successful NOC. Too often, NOCs are built considering only a subset of the above components, and as a result, they struggle to scale and deliver on the required service and financial objectives of the organization.

Talk to us to explore a NOC solution if you're experiencing any of these problem indicators:

• Increasing expenses without corresponding improvements in network performance or service quality
• Inefficient use of resources, including staff and tools
• Difficulty in allocating funds for network improvements or growth initiatives
• Reduced competitiveness in the market due to high costs
• Inability to meet financial targets or maintain profitability