What is Network Operations & Best Practices

Network operation Center refers to the activities carried out by internal network personnel or by third parties that companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage and respond to alerts regarding the availability and performance of their networks. The team that has the primary responsibility for network operations is often called a network operations analyst or network operations engineer.

A Network Operations Center, often called NOC Operations (pronounced "knock"), is generally a centralized location where the network operations team provides supervision, monitoring and administration 24 hours a day, seven days a week, servers, databases, firewalls, devices and related external services. This infrastructure environment can be located on the site and with a cloud provider.

Some main activities of the network operation are:

• Network Monitoring
• Incident response
• Communication management (email, voice, and video)
• Performance, quality, and optimization of reports.
• Installation of software/firmware, troubleshooting and updating of network elements.
• Patch management
• Backup and storage
• Firewall management
• Intrusion prevention system (IPS) and other security tools for implementation and monitoring, in collaboration with Security Operations
• Threat analysis and radio explosion analysis in partnership with security operations

Challenges Faced By Network Operations

Due to the complexity of today's Network Operation Center and services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, the network operations team faces many challenges , not just associated with knowledge. Deep technology itself, but it also maintains optimized access to communications between everyone involved.

These are some of the main challenges related to the operation of the network:

• Lack of collaboration/coordination between teams
• The rapid rate of change in the cloud and the orchestration of dynamic resources means that the documentation is generally not up to date to solve problems
• Troubleshooting takes time since it usually involves the correlation of data between multiple devices and toolkits and requires manual processes to achieve reliable diagnostics
• Many different tools from different vendors used may require the team to work with different technologies, low-level utilities and command-line interfaces (CLI)
• Problems arise and disappear when all the information for problem-solving is needed
• It is often necessary to scale executives to assess root causes

Network Best Practices

Well-managed network operations teams adopt a variety of proven and sound best practices. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Continuous monitoring of a wide range of information and network systems, which include
• communication circuits, cloud resources, LAN / WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls and VoIP systems and delivery applications.
• Provide rapid response to all incidents, interruptions, and performance issues.
• Categorization of the problems to be sized for the appropriate technical teams.
• Recognize, identify, and prioritize incidents according to the client's business requirements, organizational policies and operational impact.
• Collect and review performance reports for various systems and report performance trends to the senior technical team to help predict future problems or disruptions.
• Document all actions following standard company policies and procedures.
• Notify customers and third-party service providers of problems, interruptions, and repair status.
• Work with internal and external technical and service teams to create and / or update knowledge base articles.
• Perform necessary system tests and operational tasks (installation of patches, network connectivity tests, script execution, etc.).
• Support for multiple technical teams in 24x7 operating environments with high availability requirements. Various work schedules may include a day or night hours.

In this list of best practices, today's team is more likely to focus on network performance compared to application availability. But the availability and performance of applications are essential to meet the business objectives of companies and service providers. The transfer of applications to the cloud will be the primary driver of network operations and will spend more time in the availability and performance of applications in the future. More specifically, network operations teams should ensure that internal and external networks and services do not impede the availability of the form, but speed up their delivery.