What is Network Operations?

Network refers to the activities of internal network employees or third parties that companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage, and respond to alerts about the availability and performance of their network. Employees who have primary responsibility for network operations are often referred to as network operations analysts or network operations engineers.

A network operations center, often called a NOC (pronounced "knock"), is typically a central location where network operations personnel work around the network, servers, databases, firewalls, devices, and related assets all 365 days of the year. It shows weekly monitors, monitors and manages external services. This infrastructure environment can be located locally and / or at a cloud-based provider.

Some important network operations are:

• Network monitoring
• Incident response
• Communication management (email, voice and video)
• Performance, quality and optimization reports.
• Software / firmware installation, troubleshooting and updating of network elements.
• Patch management
• Backup and storage
• Firewall management
• Provision and monitoring of the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and other security tools in cooperation with Security Operations
• Threat analysis and blast radius analysis in cooperation with security operations
• Networking challenges

Due to the complexity of today's networks and services, particularly given the introduction of a cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, network operations personnel face many challenges not only with a deep understanding of the technology itself, but also with maintenance and technology. You must provide optimized communication access between all parties.

Some important challenges in network operation are:

• Lack of cooperation / coordination between teams.
• Rapid changes in the cloud and dynamic resource orchestration mean that troubleshooting documentation is generally outdated
• Troubleshooting is time consuming because data is often correlated across multiple devices, and manual toolkits and processes are required to perform informed diagnostics
• Many different tools are used from different vendors, and employees may need to work with different technologies, low-level utilities, and command line interfaces (CLI).
• Problems occur and then disappear when all the information necessary for troubleshooting is collected
• It is often necessary to escalate to more senior staff to identify root causes

Read More: noc meaning it