Many Network Operations Centers do not achieve the desired service levels. This may be due to numerous inefficiencies; poor organization of the manpower, not having clear established procedures, not adequately monitoring the structure or not having efficient tools.

Ineffective NOCs are costly, damage a company’s reputation, slow down service and expose all the network resources to threats and vulnerabilities.

There are numerous good practices to improve your NOC management.  Below are just a few that will improve your network performance and customer satisfaction.

Best practices for Network Operation Centers:

1. Identify and Mitigate Incidents Based on Specific Criteria [Incident Handling]

A classification system is key to effectively solving faults produced in your network, predicting trends, even correlating better and identifying the root cause of problems. In the case that your classification procedures are properly defined, you will be able to meet SLA requirements, identify faults affecting your organisation and customers, determine which incidents produce the biggest impact and optimise your response-time, among other benefits.

2. Maintain your Network up to Date

A simple outdated device can cause a huge headache. If you want proof, all you have to do is look at the O2 case (a Telefónica subsidiary), that suffered a day-long outage caused by an expired software certificate – a situation that could have been avoided very easily.

To have your network updated will not only avoid costly outages, but also increase the resilience and security of your network.

3. Collect Performance Data and Generate Reports

The more information you have about your network performance, the better decisions you will be able to make. But, this does not only require collecting data, it is about analysing that information, even start using Machine Learning mechanisms. If you have studied the data regarding your network behaviour, you will have everything under control, and this will even help you achieve higher performance levels.

If you define the structure of your reports appropriately, you can automate them without spending time generating them. Therefore, you can analyse the data with the necessary periodicity and determine the limits or key indicators that will warn you if something is not working well.

4. Develop and Maintain a Business Continuity Plan

Your Business Continuity Plan is essential to ensure the operation of your infrastructure. If something serious happens, it will be your guide to solve the problem; a situation in which time is of the essense. However, it is not a document that you create and that is not touched again until a real threat occurs. It is an active document that must be reviewed and updated frequently.

Make sure your Plan contains, at the bare minimum, the following:

• A real analysis, based on extensive research, of the threats and vulnerabilities to which your company may be exposed.
• Metrics with which to identify and measure threats and impacts.
• Data recovery in the event of a devastating event.
• Personnel involved and their responsibilities.

5. Focus on User Experience as your Core

The customer is the center of your activity. The objective of a NOC is to provide clients with the highest levels of quality in the service provided. Likewise the most difficult task of a network operation centre is keeping the network running with great efficiency, but other factors such as incident resolution, communication, transparency and agility also play a key role.

We recommend you to establish a customer experience program to properly determine and solve incidents, whilst continually improving your services for the end-user.

From SGRwin we improve network management and monitoring processes of numerous organisations. Our solution SGRwin is already implemented in more than 80 NOCs worldwide. Transform the way you work, improve your performance with our software.