Senior Solutions Executive, INOC Hal has worked at INOC for over 14 years, maintaining the positions of director of business development and senior solutions executive. His current projects include market opportunity assessments, solution design, proposal development, and creating sales policies and processes. Before INOC, Hal worked in various business development, sales, and management roles for communications service providers.
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Our award-winning outsourced NOC support services provide exactly the level of support you need—when you need it. Focus your attention and resources on revenue-generating projects and leave infrastructure monitoring and management to us. Our NOC can rapidly respond to incidents and events and continue to implement changes as needed, all under a more cost-effective service model.
No matter the size or type of your business, outages are inevitable. Some may have a limited impact. Others may cause severe and potentially catastrophic damage. In any case, every second of downtime can cost you time and money.
A properly developed and well-managed Network Operations Center (NOC) is the bulwark against downtime and its costs. An effective NOC is both reactive in mitigating losses when unavoidable downtime strikes and proactive in improving network, infrastructure, and application performance to keep those events to an absolute minimum.
A poorly organized and run NOC, by contrast, leaves your technology investments—and the business activities that rely on them—constantly exposed and vulnerable.
The “NOC as a service” (or NOCaaS) support model helps enterprises and communications service providers offload the costs and complexities of establishing and maintaining a NOC to better allocate their resources to revenue-generating projects.
Here, we define what NOC as a service means and what companies should consider when deciding how best to pursue and secure the support they need.
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The term “NOC as a Service” can have a few different meanings, so it’s important to clarify what we’re talking about.
NOC as a Service (Network Operations Center as a Service) is an outsourced model where an organization contracts with a specialized third-party provider to handle the 24/7 monitoring, management, and support of its IT infrastructure and networks.
Here at INOC, we use the term "NOC as a Service" interchangeably with "Outsourced NOC Services." They both typically refer to a customized outsourced operational service that takes on the cost and complexity of setting up and completely running operations or augmenting the client’s NOC, such as performing off-hours services or operationally and technically managing a subset of the infrastructure.
The NOC service provider first conducts an assessment to learn precisely how the service needs to be established and operationalized. Then they work with the client to turn up services. Support is delivered as an ongoing service—likely much more cost-effectively and less stressfully than performing those functions in-house.
This service typically includes:
The features and benefits of the NOC as a Service model that attracts so many companies to it versus building a NOC in-house include:
In essence, the NOC as a Service model allows organizations to benefit from enterprise-grade NOC capabilities without the significant investment in infrastructure, tools, and personnel required to build and maintain an in-house NOC. This model is particularly beneficial for businesses that need 24/7 support but cannot justify the expense of a fully staffed internal NOC or for those looking to free up their internal IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
When companies say they’re looking to “stand up a NOC” and are considering doing that themselves or outsourcing that work to a third-party NOC provider, NOC as a Service, as we described it here, is most likely the right fit. Companies typically have a lot of tasks for the NOC to do; the support provider will replicate what an in-house NOC team would otherwise be doing and carry out support.
That’s in contrast to, for instance, turning up service for some number of devices at a specific set price per month. That’s more in line with a traditional managed service—something that’s a great fit for IT integrators or circuit providers looking to add white-labeled support to their products, but not such a great fit for most enterprises and service providers that need a much more involved and customized solution. (Head to our partner page to learn more about enhancing your managed service offering with 24x7 white-labeled NOC support.)
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There are typically seven key reasons companies partner with us to take advantage of the NOC as a Service model.
Let's break them down quickly.
Establishing and maintaining an in-house NOC requires significant investments in personnel, tools, and infrastructure. For most businesses, these expenses are hard to justify due to the typically low utilization rates of in-house NOC resources. Most companies needing NOC support don't require enough to justify building and staffing an in-house NOC. Outsourcing NOC support allows access to high-quality services at a fraction of the cost — often 50% less than running an in-house operation at INOC.
Compared to the months or years needed to find NOC specialists, build a team, and develop an operationally mature in-house NOC, outsourcing can condense this process into just a few weeks—often more cost-effectively.
Building an in-house NOC involves planning, hiring, training, and aligning over the operational plan, which can take a minimum of 16 to 24 weeks. Gaining confident control over the system can take additional months.
For many companies, achieving operational maturity — where the NOC has the necessary data, technical capability, and support to improve continually — can take years.
Outsourced NOCs offer significant scalability and flexibility. As your business grows, our NOC can seamlessly scale to meet increasing demands without the need for additional in-house investments.
This flexibility allows for quick adaptation to changing business needs, whether it’s expanding services, accommodating new technologies, or adjusting to fluctuating workloads. Our clients maintain optimal performance and reliability without the complexities and costs of scaling an in-house operation.
Requiring staff to be on-call after hours and on weekends to respond to alerts could seriously affect morale and job efficiency. Burnout and potential indifference due to nuisance alarms and alerts add to the toll.
By outsourcing NOC support, companies redirect their internal IT resources towards more strategic, revenue-generating projects so they can innovate and grow while leaving break/fix to true NOC experts.
Many businesses grow or evolve to require round-the-clock network monitoring, which can be challenging and expensive to maintain in-house. NOC service providers offer 24/7 support as a standard feature, ensuring constant vigilance over your networks.
Professional NOC service providers often deliver improved performance thanks to their specialized focus and advanced tools. They typically offer detailed reporting and analytics, allowing businesses to track and optimize their network performance more effectively.
Here are just a few specific examples from our client book:
NOC service providers invest heavily in advanced monitoring tools, analytics platforms, and robust infrastructure. These resources are often beyond the reach of individual companies due to high costs and complexity.
Here at INOC for example, our clients inherit the capabilities of our Ops 3.0 Platform — our operating system for delivering NOC service. Its design enables us to ingest alarm feeds from various sources, auto-correlate those events into a single ticket, and present that ticket through a single pane of glass for efficient Incident, Problem, and Capacity Management.
In short, the Ops 3.0 platform enables our team to increase its accuracy and speed while reducing delays in human involvement. It frees NOC engineers to spend less time in the runbook and more time on strategic client projects.
More on that below.
Ops 3.0 is the third major iteration of INOC's platform, serving as a comprehensive operating system for technology, operations, and service delivery. It enhances NOC service delivery by automating the ingestion, correlation, and ticketing of alarm feeds, increasing accuracy and speed while minimizing human delays.
Below is a high-level schematic of the platform and how it connects to — and integrates with — a client's infrastructure and existing NMS, ITSM, and communications tooling.
The workflow generally moves from the left to the right of the diagram as monitoring tools output alarm and event information from a client NMS or ours into our platform, where a number of tools process and correlate that data, generate incidents and tickets enriched with critical information from our CMDB, and triage and work them through a combination of machine learning and human engineering resources. ITSM platforms are integrated to bring activities back into the client's support environment and the system is integrated with client communications.
Our VP of Technology, Jim Martin, explains:
Here's a more detailed breakdown of the platform:
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Once companies see the comparative upside to outsourcing their NOC support, the next question is, “What exactly will we get?”
That answer will vary from one service provider to the next, which is why it’s critical to ensure a provider’s service catalog is well-defined and covers exactly what you need along with value-added services.
Here at INOC, our service catalog covers a wide range of operational support functions for proactively monitoring, detecting, and measuring service availability and performance across the infrastructure and its support operations—24x7 or whenever you need us.
Here's a high-level breakdown of our service catalog:
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:
An underperforming NOC can suffer from a number of challenges . Sometimes, it’s a technical problem, such as a monitoring tool that hasn’t evolved or an NOC that’s under-operationalized and dangerously vulnerable as a result.
In the former case, an expert outsourced service provider can help you understand exactly which tools are optimal given the factors at hand or how existing tools can be updated, condensed, or reconfigured to meet the business’s evolving needs.
In the latter case, a service provider will immerse themselves in your business to understand how best to operationalize the support function. An experienced NOC service provider will collectively have an extensive breadth of best practices and a clear process for capturing service gaps and readily resolving them—important capabilities that are tough to pull off in-house.
Below, we’ve identified five of the eleven challenges we see and solve most often with effective outsourced support. For more information on these and other common challenges, grab our free white paper, Top 11 Challenges to Running a Successful NOC.
The absence of a well-structured, tiered organization in a NOC leads to a chaotic environment where all issues, regardless of complexity or urgency, are treated similarly. We see this result in inefficient use of skilled resources, with high-level engineers potentially spending time on simple tasks that could be handled by less experienced staff.
Critical issues may face delayed resolution as they get lost in the mix, and the lack of clear workflows leads to inconsistent problem handling. The "wall of red" effect, where staff are faced with a constant barrage of alerts, can lead to alert fatigue and missed critical issues. This challenge also hampers scalability and effective knowledge transfer within the organization.
Without clear tiers and defined workflows, it becomes exceedingly difficult to:
The right NOCaaS provider can implement a highly refined tiered structure that optimizes operations.
The service provider organizes workflow into sophisticated queues based on SLAs, technology types, and required skill levels.
Based on data collected across our NOCs, we found this structure can enable a NOC to resolve 65% to 75% of incidents at the Tier 1 level while reserving Tier 2 and 3 staff for more advanced issues.
Classifying NOC activities is often the first step in implementing a tiered structure. Use the following model for developing your own classification system:
Figure 1 below illustrates a well-organized tiered NOC support structure in action. Here, the Tier 1 team uses monitoring tools and interacts with end-user help desks, as well as Tier 2 and 3 engineers and third parties. Information flows between the various entities within a well-defined process framework.
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This tiered approach allows for optimal resource allocation, faster resolution times, and a reduction in routine tasks for high-level engineers. A great service partner continuously refines this structure based on performance data and emerging technologies, keeping the NOC agile and efficient.
One of the top frustrations we hear from the NOC and support teams we talk to is an inability to make data-driven decision-making and manage performance across their operation. Without comprehensive, relevant metrics, management cannot get a clear picture of NOC performance, making it challenging to identify areas for improvement or set realistic goals. They're flying blind.
This absence of data and reporting affects various aspects of NOC management, from resource allocation to performance evaluation. It becomes difficult — and sometimes near impossible — to demonstrate the NOC's value to upper management or clients without concrete performance data. The lack of trending data also hinders proactive management and effective capacity planning.
We typically see a few problems emerge from this:
A NOC as a Service provider implements a comprehensive suite of KPIs and operational metrics, leveraging their extensive experience across multiple clients. These metrics go beyond basic measures to provide deep insights into NOC performance.
Here at INOC, we immediately give our clients a suite of reporting data, including (but certainly not limited to):
Crucially, we also implement advanced utilization metrics that show exactly how NOC resources are being used. These include:
We use sophisticated analytics tools to process this data, generating actionable insights. We provide regular, detailed reports to clients, often through real-time dashboards, allowing for transparent oversight of NOC performance. This data-driven approach enables continuous improvement, helps in capacity planning, and ensures the NOC consistently meets or exceeds SLAs.
For example, by measuring the labor content for each ticket edit, NOCs can accurately determine staffing needs and workload distribution. The heatmap of edits helps in making precise staffing decisions for different times and days. These metrics, when used together, provide a holistic view of NOC utilization, enabling teams to optimize their operations for peak performance and efficiency.
Read our other guide for much more information on NOC metrics.
The rapidly evolving technology landscape creates a significant skills gap, making it difficult to find candidates with the right mix of skills for NOC operations.
High turnover is common due to the high-stress nature of NOC work, often involving night shifts, which can lead to burnout. The complexity of systems and processes results in lengthy onboarding periods, with new hires taking months to become fully productive.
Continuous training needs, driven by constant technological changes, can be time-consuming and expensive. Without clear career paths, talented staff may leave for better opportunities elsewhere.
We see this lead to a few specific problems:
The 24/7 nature of NOC operations requires careful scheduling and can lead to work-life balance issues for staff, further complicating retention efforts. Competing with other IT sectors for skilled professionals drives up hiring costs, adding financial pressure to the already challenging task of maintaining a skilled and stable workforce.
A NOC partner shoulders the burden of staffing — building and maintaining a skilled workforce so you don't have to. At INOC, we implement a comprehensive staffing strategy that begins with a skills-based NOC structure, featuring clear career progression paths from Tier 1 through to specialized roles in Tier 3 and beyond.
Our hiring process is rigorous, leveraging industry connections and advanced screening techniques to identify top talent. Once hired, new staff undergo an intensive training program, typically lasting 4-6 months. This includes classroom training on technologies and processes, simulated incident response scenarios, and carefully supervised on-the-job training.
Ongoing training is a cornerstone of the service — and one we know most clients aren't interested in taking on internally. Our engineers regularly receive updates on new technologies, emerging threats, and evolving best practices. We also offer certification programs and partnerships with technology vendors for advanced training. This approach ensures a stable, highly skilled workforce that can handle any challenge while providing consistent, high-quality service.
The lack of a standardized process framework leads to inconsistent service delivery, as similar issues may be handled differently by different staff members. This inconsistency not only affects service quality but also makes it challenging to measure performance, implement effective automation, and manage knowledge within the organization.
Without standard processes, staff may waste time deciding how to approach each issue rather than following established procedures, leading to inefficiencies and longer resolution times.
Key challenges arising from this issue include:
The absence of standardized processes also hampers efforts to implement and manage changes effectively, as there's no consistent baseline from which to work. Resource allocation becomes more challenging without clear processes to estimate resource needs for different types of issues. Ultimately, this lack of standardization can lead to unpredictable experiences for customers, potentially resulting in dissatisfaction and loss of business.
A NOC service partner should implement robust, standardized process frameworks, often based on ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) but customized to meet the specific needs of NOC operations. At INOC, we start by implementing critical processes like incident management, problem management, and service desk operations, then gradually expand to cover areas like change management, knowledge management, and service continuity.
These frameworks are deeply ingrained in every aspect of NOC operations. For incident management, for example, we implement a standardized process that includes initial triage, categorization, prioritization, investigation, resolution, and closure, with clear guidelines for escalation and communication at each stage.
We also invest heavily in training to ensure all staff members understand and consistently apply these processes. We use advanced workflow management tools that guide staff through each process, ensuring adherence to best practices.
Regular audits and continuous improvement initiatives keep these processes optimized. We leverage insights gained from managing multiple NOCs to refine these processes continuously, implementing industry best practices and innovative approaches that a single in-house NOC might not have exposure to.
The lack of a standardized process framework leads to inconsistent service delivery, as similar issues may be handled differently by different staff members. This inconsistency not only affects service quality but also makes it challenging to measure performance, implement effective automation, and manage knowledge within the organization.
Without standard processes, staff may waste time deciding how to approach each issue rather than following established procedures, leading to inefficiencies and longer resolution times.
Key challenges arising from this issue include:
The absence of standardized processes also hurts efforts to implement and manage changes effectively, as there's no consistent baseline from which to work. Resource allocation becomes more challenging without clear processes to estimate resource needs for different types of issues.
Ultimately, this lack of standardization can lead to unpredictable experiences for customers, potentially resulting in dissatisfaction and loss of business.
INOC is at the forefront of implementing AI and machine learning in NOC operations; we're positioned to make investments most companies simply couldn't justify in-house.
Here's a high-level breakdown of some of our top-line capabilities that our clients inherit:
Again, these advanced solutions offer a level of operational excellence, efficiency, and technological sophistication that would be challenging and costly for most organizations to achieve in-house.
By leveraging the scale of data and resources available to them, we deliver faster incident resolution, more proactive issue prevention, and free up human engineers to focus on complex, high-value tasks.
📄 Download our free white paper , Top 11 Challenges to Running a Successful NOC — and How to Overcome Them, for a deeper dive into these challenges and others, including:
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Although some may assume an in-house NOC affords greater control and is therefore preferred, the right outsourced NOC operation can offer a suite of capabilities and efficiency advantages that dramatically tip the scale in terms of cost and value.
The control and assurance once afforded by keeping the NOC in-house have largely been upstaged by outsourced service providers that have bridged those gaps and developed platform capabilities that simply wouldn’t be viable in-house investments due to low utilization.
Consider the following points when deciding if outsourcing NOC support is optimal for your organization.
In most organizations, staffing a NOC is often a needlessly high expenditure compared to outsourcing. Given the payroll and overhead costs of building a NOC in-house, electing for outsourced support can cut your total cost of ownership in half.
A plan that doesn’t consider this opportunity might, for example, call for a staff of 12 full-time employees, when in fact, the same or likely better support could be provided through an outsourced service solution that takes full advantage of an economy of scale to provide far better service at a far lower cost .
In addition to staffing costs, the cost of acquiring, implementing, and integrating a full suite of NOC tools only further tips the scale in favor of outsourcing much of the time.
Perhaps the most apparent difference between homegrown and outsourced NOCs are the capabilities that come with an already-mature operation and access to niche NOC expertise.
Between planning a NOC build, hiring a team, training that team, and aligning over the operational plan, in-house NOCs can expect 16 to 24 weeks minimum before all the parts are even in place. It can then take months or years to gain confident control over the system and bring it into a state of real operational maturity.
Turning up support with an outsourced NOC condenses all that time and effort into a number of weeks instead of years—often far more cost-effectively.
New clients often worry about the process of outsourcing their NOC support through the NOC as a service model. It’s the kind of project teams don't do every day, and depends on asking the right questions and gathering a full set of requirements from the start. Here at INOC, we make onboarding easy with a proven turnup process guided by experts each step of the way.
The graphic below illustrates our 4-step process (which is really a cycle) for turning up, delivering, and continually improving outsourced NOC service. We unpacked each step with a summary below it.
Read our other post for a detailed breakdown of the onboarding process: Onboarding Outsourced NOC Support: 9 Steps to Success
For most companies, the cost and complexity of building and managing a NOC is a diversion from focusing its attention where it's needed most: innovating and growing the business.
Without an effective NOC, persistent support issues lead to expensive project delays, endless stress, and serious vulnerabilities that threaten your business.
Through the NOC as a service model, an outsourced support provider helps you take control of your infrastructure through a suite of NOC solutions designed to meet the specific needs of your technology environment and operational workflow—all while enabling you to focus internal resources on the projects that move the business forward.
Want to learn more about our approach to outsourced NOC support? Contact us to see how we can help you improve your IT service strategy and NOC support, schedule a free NOC consultation with our Solutions Engineers, or download our free white paper below.
NOC as a Service refers to the outsourcing of Network Operations Center (NOC) functions to a third-party provider who handles the setup, management, and operationalization of your NOC. This can include everything from event monitoring and incident management to advanced support levels, allowing businesses to focus on core functions without the complexity of running an in-house NOC.
Businesses often outsource NOC support to alleviate the high costs and complexities of managing a NOC in-house. Outsourcing allows access to specialized expertise, reduces operational costs, and frees up internal resources to focus on revenue-generating activities. This setup ensures that networks, infrastructure, and applications are managed effectively without the burden of maintaining a full-time, in-house NOC team.
INOC's NOCaaS includes a range of services such as:
These services ensure comprehensive management of your IT infrastructure.
Outsourcing NOC support addresses several challenges including over-utilization of IT staff, high operational costs, lack of up-to-date knowledge and tools, and the operational vulnerability of under-performing NOCs. An outsourced NOC helps streamline operations, improve response times, and ensure continuous monitoring and management of IT systems.
Choosing INOC for NOC support provides businesses with a cost-effective, efficient, and scalable solution to manage their IT infrastructure. Benefits include access to expert staff around the clock, reduction in operational costs, improved performance metrics, and the ability to focus on strategic business initiatives rather than day-to-day NOC operations.
INOC ensures a smooth transition through a structured four-step process that includes requirements gathering, onboarding, ongoing service management, and continual service improvement. This process is supported by certified project managers and engagement leads who guide businesses every step of the way, from initial assessment to full operationalization.
When considering outsourced NOC support, businesses should evaluate the cost implications versus maintaining an in-house team, the expertise and maturity of the service provider, and the potential to improve operational efficiencies. It's also important to consider the specific needs of the business and whether the provider can offer a customized service that aligns with these requirements.
Businesses interested in INOC's NOCaaS can begin by contacting INOC to schedule a free consultation with their Solutions Engineers. This initial consultation will help assess specific needs and explore how INOC's outsourced NOC services can improve their IT service strategy and operational efficiencies.
Download our free white paper and learn how to overcome the top challenges in running a successful NOC.
