Network Operations Center
Traditional Network Operations Centers rely on people and process to function properly. To be sure, both of these elements are still required today, but with the rapid pace of change driven by technology and mergers and acquisitions, the effective Network Operations Center, or NOC, has to be disciplined without being static or inflexible, and include several new facets when compared to the traditional approach of detailed and inflexible processes, tools, and skill sets and personnel.
First and foremost is adaptability. Today, all It infrastructure is from various vendors, undergoes frequent change, and often includes some loading edge and some legacy technology. Some equipment may be geographically dispersed, some in an in-house data center and some collocated elsewhere. Often, the geographic and/or technology changes cause "silos" in an operation thus raising costs, harming quality and end-user satisfaction, and frustrating business units by being slow to respond to changing business needs.
BluePoint Data solves challenge of adaptability by running "on top of" typical monitoring and management systems with our Unite software and our SkyNOC service. With Unite and SkyNOC, we achieve tight integration between monitoring systems, case management and reporting without replacing or displacing the underling monitoring systems. As a result, we can typically implement SkyNOC across the enterprise, large or small in 4-6 weeks.
The second major cornerstone is adaptive staffing. The traditional approach has been to staff adequately to have all of the skills needed to operate and respond to IT infrastructure needs. This is expensive. And to keep the costs down as much as possible, businesses often seek to limit the skill set needed in an effort to keep costs down. Ironically, just the opposite happens as this causes a company to discount new technologies that can, in turn, lower costs. In the end, a company often over-spends to get all of the in house skills, or stays locked into yesterday's technology.
BluePoint's SkyNOC addresses this is in several ways. First, since we service so many customers our process and procedure for mainstream technology is deep, highly evolved, and of course, SAS70 audited... so the easy things stay easy. That's a start, but what about obscure older technologies or newer bleeding edge equipment? BluePoint maintains a network or highly skilled specialist that are the very best at these obscure or emerging technologies. Our SkyNOC team rapidly performs initial problem resolution and routes the issue to a specialist so the problem is handled quickly and appropriately, without your business enduring anyone's learning curve.
The final and possibly most important aspect of an effective NOC is versatility. Closely linked with adaptability, versatility allows a single NOC to span hosted, cloud, in-house, out-sourced, new, old, geographically dispersed, and disparate technology easy, quickly, and in support of business needs. Everything fits everything under one dashboard, under one case management system, under one virtual roof; and doing so can be accomplished in days or week, not months or years.
Today, the effective Network Operations Center requires a means to embrace change and be adaptable while retaining discipline and customer services. If you would like your Network Operations Center to have these attributes while drastically reducing your costs, please ask us about BluePoint's SkyNOC service.