Information technology monitoring, problem rectification coordination and software code upgrade deployments are the typical functions of a network operations center (NOC). With the outsourcing of increasing amounts of IT services to software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing and content delivery networks (CDNs) the role of NOCs will have to change as they become strategic parts of service delivery by providing a greater knowledge of the limitations of the third parties used.
For example with CDNs an understanding of the relationship of jitter, delay, bandwidth, packet loss on the user experience measured by broken images, abandoned videos, and suboptimal bit rate streams will be needed. Capacity planning related to origin server infrastructure and the capabilities of vendors to handle not just your growth, but the growth of all their customers’ trend and spike load needs at the regional, national and international levels must also be known.
With cloud computing capacity planning it will have to examine both the minimum and maximum service levels expected as multiple customers vie for the same resources. Each class of service will have subtle variations in its replicated components as there will be no guarantee of uniformity in the rate of technology replacements and updates within the various tiers of infrastructure. Services will have to be auto provisioned and decommissioned by the NOC based on predefined load triggers to ensure the operational cost mimics actual usage more accurately. NOCs will have to raise the alarm when they suspect a cloud is incapable of providing the service levels and be involved in suggesting ways of adding more providers or migrating to new ones. The NOC will also have to have an input in architecture of applications that will have to tolerate inconsistent response times and availability of related services as the cloud provider tries to transparently reallocate resources dynamically.
SaaS vendors will inject additional challenges. In the past they would be the primary service provider running software on their own infrastructure. Expect them to start taking advantage of cloud computing providers to whom they will cede portions of control in both highly integrated and decoupled ways. NOCs will have to interact with tiered support structures to determine and verify the true cause of issues. This will require spearheading the creation of not just post-sales but also technical level ties with multiple vendors to achieve deeper operational understanding.
In summary, the NOC will have to become proactive not just on the day to day tactical level of issue resolution but also strategically in measuring a plethora of data with the aim of helping the larger organization in identifying quantifiable trends related to internal and external IT infrastructure. Expect future NOCs to have twin levels of interaction with all the groups they interact to cover both the immediate needs (monitoring, rectification and code deployment) and long term requirements (measurement, trending, capacity planning, automation and cost control) for the company. In future NOC will have a group with multiple tiers of 24/7 technical staff working alongside a smaller team of technical business analysts and architects trying to figure out ways to eliminate service impacting events in future with periodic continuous improvement meetings with stakeholders. Get ready now.
NOCs will be the first place to which companies will go to for hard data when dealing with the service level agreement (SLA) expectations of external web vendors and they should start preparing for that day now.
