What is Network Operations? & Best Practices

Network operations refer to activities carried out by internal network personnel 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. The personnel who have primary responsibility for network operations are often referred to as network operations analysts or network operations engineers.

A Network Operations Centre, often called a NOC (pronounced "knock"), is generally a centralized location where network operations centers provide network supervision, monitoring, and administration 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. . , servers, databases, firewalls, devices and associated external services. This infrastructure environment can be located on-site and / or with a cloud provider.

Some key activities in the operation of the network are:

• Network monitoring
• Incident response
• Communication management (email, voice and video)
• Performance, quality and optimization reports.
• Installing software / firmware, troubleshooting, and updating network elements
• Patch management
• Backup and storage
• Firewall management
• Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and other security monitoring and implementation tools, in collaboration with security operations
• Threat analysis and blast radius analysis in collaboration with security operations.

Challenges Facing Network Operations

Due to the complexity of today's networks and services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, network operations personnel face many challenges, not only associated with a deep understanding of the technology itself, but maintaining simplified access to communications among all involved.

Here are some important challenges related to network operation:

• Lack of collaboration / coordination between teams
• Rapid rate of change in the cloud and dynamic resource orchestration means documentation is generally out of date to resolve issues
• Troubleshooting takes time, as it often involves correlating data across multiple devices and toolkits and requires manual processes to arrive at reliable diagnoses
• Many disparate tools from different vendors may require staff to work with different technologies, low-level utilities, and command line interfaces (CLI)
• Problems arise and then disappear when all information is needed for problem solving
• Escalating executives is often necessary to assess root causes