Competitive Advantages of an NOC for MSPs

As we know well that it has become very important to use the NOC services due to the increasing competition and less time to focus on our own IT department. Today all the MSPs are trying to go beyond outsourcing an NOC. They are searching for an exclusive center meeting their current requirement of monitoring and maintenance.

The main reason of the top MSPs service quality level at this competitive level is they are just making strong relationship bond with their outsourced NOCs. They are giving them service on a twenty four by seven basis. Outsourcing helps the organizations in reduction of their basic costs as well as increasing their revenues and profits. It helps in applying their input costs into their core business and not in the IT issues because there is someone exclusively doing the job for them.

It is so because in this competitive level the IT department of the NOC has to be best and it must have the best team of system administrators and other engineers. With this the NOC is able to fix the technical faults before they hamper the business operations. The best competitive value of an NOC is that is alerts the client against any technical issue before it can harm their business and fixes it proactively as well.

Another important advantage of NOCs to MSPs is the use of best applications performing the tasks of monitoring to reduce the outage into the network. This empowers the technology and the working efficiency of the devices connected to the network. The client also succeeds in generating new revenues due to the zero downtime error. In this way the network operations center helps MSPs and clients to focus on their current business activities and not bother about the IT maintenance procedure. This is a great help and advantage of an NOC.

RMM Tools Empower NOC's To Monitor Client's Network More Efficiently

Today various RMM tools are being used by the NOC service providers globally. To understand how RMM tools help NOC’s to effectively monitor their client’s network first we should know what RMM is.

What is RMM?

The Remote monitoring & management is an assembly of IT tools which are used for the monitoring of client workstation and other IT devices. These are located on the devices of the clients and do the work of collecting the data. This data includes the information related to the hardware and other software from the client’s site and it is sent to the service provider. If there any issue occurs it will be resolved as soon as possible without giving any downtime to the client’s network.

RMM is comprised of a complete interface of IT services tools such as remote monitoring, server support and trouble ticket monitoring. RMM works on a proactive basis and does the task of real time monitoring of the network and helps the engineers and service technicians to fix the issues.

How RMM helps in monitoring the client’s network?

As we have discussed that RMM works on proactive basis, it efficiently catches the issues and quickly sends it the live engineers and system administrators sitting on a remote location. When these engineers get the alerts they fix these issues from their remote location and send the relevant data and reports also to the client. There may be various types of active maintenance tasks like operating system updates installation, disk defragmentation, antivirus updating and many more tasks like these.

When all these issues are solved proactively, the client can easily focus on its core business operations. This helps in increasing the business productivity because the IT network is managed and maintained with the help of effective remote monitoring and management tools.

Why Outsource to India for best NOC services?

As most of the companies today are using NOC as their extended IT support department. The trend of using them is increasing day by day due to the benefits and easiness. If we research for the location of these network operations centers mostly we find them located in India itself. It is very difficult to find an NOC totally USA based or any other part of the globe.

The first major factor is cost effectiveness or affordability for a service, engineer, hardware, software and all is available in India as compared to any other part of the world. The main benefit is that we can easily find the system administrators and other service technicians that are cheaper and offer an efficient service. This part is growing rapidly because of the talent as well we find better among the manpower in comparison to other geographical location than in India.

Another parameter is we have original equipment manufacturer as well as the software vendors having their service support sites in India that helps the clients to choose India for it. There are many other parameters as well but the above two are also ample enough for India to be chosen for NOC services outsourcing. It is foreseen that this will continue in the future if all these things would be available in India. This will help the MSPs who are employing NOCs to service their clients in a more efficient manner. The clients can easily increase their profits because they do not have to worry about their IT department which they have outsourced here. They also receive a better response time from India based NOC services providers than that of any other part of the world.

Time zone also helps sometimes in rendering services to overseas clients. Many times they are not able to monitor their sites but they do not worry about it because they know that we are doing a real time monitoring on a twenty four by seven basis. It is another parameter for India being an effective NOC service provider location.

Questions MSPs Need to Ask NOC Providers

For those who are operating a network operations center (NOC) there occur many questions that many MSPs ask to them. These questions may be based on many parameters on which an NOC is operating or going to offer its services to its prospective clients. Not only are this there many problems that also rise during the journey of operating a new NOC.

There are many questions that many VARs and MSPs ask when they go for NOC services. An NOC services provider can have many queries like where is the actual location of the network operations center. Another important query comes is how many levels of service are available or applied to make sure about the reduction of downtime.

Many clients ask about the ITIL standards whether the service provider is following it or not. They also ask about the escalation process of the center. Many service providers integrate it with their PSA tools. The service level agreement (SLA) is also very important to look after as every client asks about the service provider’s terms and conditions for providing its services.

There are also many tips for the VARs and MSPs to aware while going for NOC services such as they should have an understanding about the NOC team. It is like an extension to their IT department and in this case the NOC team should work as an extended department of its client. The communication process must be very secure if they are using chat system, emailing process and other ticketing systems.

The MSPs and VARs should have an exclusive system for documentation because the PSA or RMM tools may not be able to collect all the documented data of the client site. The technology your NOC partner and the client’s should be matched at the present time to work smoothly.

Above are some of the basic questions and tips for MSPs and VAARs to follow while going for the NOC services.

Next Generation NOC Services for Enterprises

As with the demand of the day the use of NOC is increasing day by day. It is because organizations do not have time to give on their IT department they just want an extension to their IT department. They want their IT processes to be managed and maintained by another so that they can easily focus on their critical business operations and increase their productivity.

With this a number of companies are taking the next generation Network Operations Center services. For this demand the NOCs are not rebuilding them into next generation NOCs. There are many factors to look for applying this process to become a next generation NOC.

First of all the organizational structure should be established into which total size of the company should be considered. Another part is to be looked is how many time zones are given service. What type of support is given such as how many tiers are there or how many service levels are there in it?

After that the NOC policies and processes should be clear and pre-defined in order to make the operations smooth. Do your organization doing any documentation for the operations it is running or not? It is also mentioned that it is following the ITIL processes and procedures or not. All these help in running the NOC smooth.

Another important part is the service quality, timely comparison between the past and the current levels of service quality is important. For this part there should be latest tools and technology available at all the time to give the client an enhanced level of service quality. This parameter also makes the NOC service level up to next generation. There are many more parameters on which we can work to take the NOC up to another higher level of service, efficiency; smooth operations as well as customer satisfaction will be discussed later.

Building and Improving on a Network Operations Center

At the present time we see that most of the growing organizations are spending on the IT infrastructure and its maintenance. They take the services from an outsourced service provider on an affordable subscription cost. These outsourced service providers are mostly Network Operations Center. Today these NOC service providers are tremendously improving their offerings and building their client network at a speedy rate.

But due to the daily advancement in the technology it is difficult to maintain and manage the critical IT networks. For this these service providers are trying significantly hard to sort out this problem. They are making themselves as a centralized part for network monitoring and management for their clients. Companies hire them as their remote IT department that manages their IT department as an extension to it.

If any organization wants to develop its own IT department or NOC it requires a good amount of capital investment to maintain it. A team of skilled engineers and technicians to work is the first priority. All these depend on the size of the organization. For this many of them cut their infrastructure costs to save more and more funds for this purpose. For an efficient network operations center it is vital to have accurate planning for its design and location. It is so because the safety it important to provide round the clock solutions to the clients. Planning for the disaster recovery processes is also important to be done before setting up the NOC.

Another important planning is about the IT devices comprising hardware, computer as well as other IT network instruments. The technology that should be used is also one of the best ones to make the NOC successful in operations. Lastly skilled workforce management and hiring should be done for running all these things smoothly. Experienced staff is the backbone of any successful network operations center.

Difference between Custom NOC Services and Fix Plan NOC Services

According to the current business trend and competition every organization is using an IT department. It is due to the need of the business as the productivity of the business depends on it as well. Hence it has become necessary to have a separate IT department to cater the need for the latest technological tools and techniques to increase the business productivity.

With this the NOC services providers have started a variety of services for different clients across the globe according to their needs. They are offering different service subscription packages according to the need of their client. There are mainly two types of service packages are available such as a Fix Plan NOC Service and the other one is Custom NOC Service.

In a fix plan the client is given the support services for a predefined number of PCs, servers or networks. The amount of monitoring hours is also fixed. It can or cannot have a multiple levels of support options but the number of levels of support is fixed. The pricing is also fixed is such type of package.

Whereas in a custom tailored NOC service it is not necessary to pay for the whole package but the client only have to pay for what service options are being used. In this the levels of support are flexible, if the client does not want to go for all the levels he can choose according to its requirement. In comparison to fix plan the custom package is better one as it have many flexibility options and it is affordable to all the business.