About INOC INOC Frequently Asked Questions

INOC is an ISO 27001:2013 certified 24×7 NOC and an award-winning global provider of NOC Lifecycle Solutions®, including NOC support, optimization, design, and build services for enterprises, communications service providers, and OEMs. INOC solutions significantly improve the support provided to partners’ and clients’ customers and end users.

INOC assesses internal NOC operations to improve efficiency and shorten response times and provides best practices consulting to optimize, design, and build NOC operations, frameworks, and procedures. Proactive 24×7 NOC support is provided with several options, including North America, EU, or APAC only or global integrated NOCs. INOC’s 24×7 staff provides a hands-on approach to incident resolution for technology infrastructure support.

INOC is a NOC services provider, not a NOC software provider. Our NOC “platform” is not a SaaS or similar type of product. Rather, it’s the platform upon which our support services operate, and through which our clients interface with us.

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.

• Event Monitoring and Management — We monitor, detect, and process events and faults related to client networks, IT infrastructures, and services such as status changes or usage to determine the appropriate action, often resulting in an incident being logged for fault management.
• Incident Management — We detect and resolve incidents in order to restore services as quickly as possible and minimize downtime of our clients’ proactively monitored infrastructure and services. Notification, Tier 1, 2, and 3 services are available.
• Problem Management — For those receiving our Tier 3 Incident Management services, Standard Problem Management includes performing activities needed to diagnose the root cause of incidents and submitting change requests to resolve those problems. Predictive Problem Management aims to avoid incidents proactively. This service also maintains information about problems and workarounds for use by Incident Management.
• Capacity Management — We record and manage the performance, utilization, and capacity of our clients’ infrastructure components to ensure client service-level targets are being met.
• On-Demand NOC Support — We provide backup—overflow, disaster recovery—NOC support for our non-24x7 clients.
• Product Support — We provide white-labeled technical support to clients of system integrators, OEMs, and independent software vendors. Notification, Tier 1, 2, and 3 services are available.
• Help Desk Support — We record and manage service requests—for information, advice, standard troubleshooting support, or access to a service—for the client’s end users and end customers.
• Call Center Support — We record and route calls from our clients’ end users and end customers.
• Service Transition Planning and Support — We work together with our clients to define the specific steps for the initial setup of support, including per-customer onboarding if applicable.
  • New Service Onboarding — We onboard client and customer infrastructure with client-supplied information and assistance. Get in touch with us to see all the services included in standard turn-up support, including CMDB setup, connectivity, ticket system, alarm monitoring setup, call and email setup, NOC runbooks, and much more.
  • Change Management — We record and manage changes to infrastructure, services, and monitoring. After New Service Onboarding is complete, we make subsequent changes to our support to reflect changes in our clients’ or their customers’ infrastructure and support environments. These changes include scheduled maintenance support as well as Requests for Change, including move, add, change, and delete requests.
  • Service Asset and Configuration Management — SACM defines the service and infrastructure components required to deliver services to our clients and maintains accurate configuration records. Configuration records also include service and asset relationship information. This support process allows for better Change Management, Incident Management, and Problem Management and ensures adherence to standards, legal requirements, and regulatory obligations.
• Service Reporting and Service Analysis — Service Reporting provides reports about INOC support. Service Analysis aligns the services with changing client business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to the services we provide. The objective of this process is to improve effectiveness and achieve these objectives in more economical ways. Service Analysis measures and monitors process compliance, quality, performance, and the business value of a given process.
• Complementary Support Services — Complementary support services include Platform Integration Services, Client Runbook Development Client Infrastructure Management Setup, Custom Functionality, and Provisioning.

Here are some of the central challenges we solve:

1. Lack of tiered organization/workflow

Symptoms of this challenge include over-utilized technology staff, and missed opportunities for reducing support costs.

How we solve it: Implement a tiered organization/workflow. Our Structured NOC radically transforms where and how support activities are managed—both by tier and category. In a matter of months, the value of our operational framework becomes abundantly clear as support activities steadily migrate to their appropriate tiers, lightening the load on advanced engineers while working and resolving issues faster and more effectively.

2. Insufficient operational metrics

Symptoms of this challenge include teams remaining blind to issues and opportunities, with high costs resulting from this lack of visibility.

How we solve it: Track meaningful operational metrics. To ensure performance and operational efficiency are measured across every dimension, we set performance objectives and evaluate them on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Since the amount of data available to a NOC is daunting, we help you choose the metrics that are most applicable and actionable to your specific operation. These should reflect the size and scale of your operation and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure performance against relevant organization objectives.

3. Difficulty in staff hiring, training, and retention

Symptoms of this challenge include a limited focus on staff and their growth and high turnover.

How we solve it: A strategy for hiring, training, and retaining top talent. At INOC, we shoulder the burden of staffing your support team, so you can focus elsewhere. We consider the following factors when developing our own staffing strategy:

• NOC Organization Structure
• Utilization Metrics
• Benefits Plan
• Training
• Retention

4. Poor process frameworks

Symptoms of this challenge include a lack of consistency in responsiveness and slow (or difficult) troubleshooting.

How we solve it: Our approach to 24x7 NOC support solves these problems through structure—enabling your team to stop putting out fires and start working on the projects that move you forward. Our NOC support framework typically reduces high-tier support activities by 60% or more, often as much as 90%. Need us to take on all levels of support? Dedicate your full time and attention to growing and strengthening your service. We’ll deliver world-class NOC support conveyed through a common language for fast, effective communication with you, your customers, and all impacted third parties.

5. Lack of business continuity

Symptoms of these challenges include constant vulnerability to disasters and significant business disruptions.

How we solve it: We maintain distributed data centers, NOCs, and workforces to keep your infrastructure supported 24x7 in the event of any significant business disruption. Through a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan, we’re fully prepared to maintain sufficient distribution and resiliency across facilities, technologies, and workforces to keep ourselves, and you and your customers, up and running from any location, at all times.

6. Disparate tools and platforms

Symptoms of this challenge include lots of data, but nothing easily actionable. Critical issues are missed.

How we solve it: We integrate seamlessly with all your support systems, both technical and procedural, to fill gaps, enhance current capabilities, and offer entirely new ones. Whether you need simple support augmentation to escalate activities to your engineers or a NOC team that can take a more active role in working and resolving issues, we integrate with virtually any tool, process, or system to help you meet the growing demands for service among end-users and customers.

7. Out-of-date documentation and runbooks

Symptoms of this challenge include persistent, recurring problems.

How we solve it: Our NOC runbooks thoroughly document and guide you through operational support processes. You get all the information you need to make NOC service effective and efficient, whether we’re handling support for you, or you’re taking it on in-house.

Other documentation solutions include:

• Infrastructure Documentation — All diagrams, supporting circuits and applications, server information, and other infrastructure details are laid out to show interrelations between infrastructure components and visualize support flows. We also document the connections between key alarms and the infrastructure to know when critical services may be being impacted.
• Process Documentation — We lay out all procedural steps teams will take, whether it's answering the phone, collecting and documenting the right information about reported issues and incidents, or any other interaction or activity that will take place.
• Links to Tools/Contacts/Data — We document and link all external tools and data that the NOC may need as part of issue resolution, as well as all internal and third-party contacts.

Alarm-to-Action Guide — We group together the top incident-generating alarms and ensure the process for resolution is clear. We often prioritize the top 90% within the volume of alarms as most of these issues can be handled at Tier 1, lightening the load on advanced engineers.

8. Inability to scale

Symptoms of this challenge include slowed business growth due to unscalable support.

How we solve it: Here at INOC, our shared NOC is staffed with skilled NOC personnel, from tiered groups of engineers to change specialists, and round-the-clock management. Once the systems to be monitored have been pointed at our infrastructure, we receive ticket alerts, emails, and phone calls where they are triaged for severity and worked as our engineers move through the queue of shared client events. The engineers utilize INOC tools, and use alarm-to-action guides that are built off standardized support methods, and adapted to fit the client’s business. Through platform integrations, the shared NOC is highly scalable. Escalations are typically handled internally through the shift supervisors and managers.

9. No quality management

Symptoms of this challenge include a lack of quality, missed opportunities providing support, problems that reemerge, and teams staying reactive.

How we solve it: Our approach to Customer Experience Management (CEM) goes above and beyond the baseline standards to deliver exceptional experiences for you and your customers. Dedicated quality control and assurance programs maintain proactive and reactive checks on virtually every component of the service we provide. These quality measures come together with next-level reporting capabilities to deliver a comprehensive Continual Service Improvement (CSI) offering—the key components for effective CEM. From ticketing to working issues to the minutiae of onboarding or off-boarding, we see everything as an opportunity to better align ourselves with your needs in sustainable and repeatable ways.

We help businesses reduce costs, improve efficiency, and access specialized expertise, which ensures the smooth and reliable operation of their networks and IT infrastructures. Rather than shoulder the costly burden of building, scaling, and managing a NOC, our clients and partners immediately plug into our operationally mature, highly scalable NOC operation for a fraction of the cost and complexity.

Here are just some of the key advantages and outcomes our clients and partners enjoy from their engagement with us:

• Immediate access to a structured NOC environment, expertise, and best practices — Outsourcing to an experienced NOC service provider gives you virtually immediate access to a support platform and team that’s spent years—or even decades—refining itself into a well-oiled, highly-capable operation. This is especially advantageous for enterprises, service providers, and similarly, tech-heavy organizations whose support environments demand high-quality service now—not in five years. 
• Faster speed to market and support performance — Putting aside the time it takes to become operationally mature, simply bringing a NOC “online” can take an in-house team far longer than it takes to turn up and onboard with a NOC service provider. Between planning the build, hiring a team, training that team, and aligning over the operational plan, in-house NOCs can expect 9 to 12 months minimum before all the parts are even in place. It can then take several months to gain confident control over the system—and then several years to become operationally mature to the point where the NOC has the data, technical capability, and additional support it needs to improve itself continually. We typically get clients up and running on our NOC in six to nine weeks. Outsourcing your support function to a mature NOC not only reduces the time it takes to get your business’s NOC support turned up but also provides superior speed of service once it’s up and running. Incidents are diagnosed and often “de-escalated” by an advanced team first (our Advanced Incident Management (AIM) team) rather than filtering the issue up through lower tiers immediately. This approach helps ensure the issue is quickly routed to the correct team and is addressed with the correct solution for the technology being used and according to service levels, with the aim of driving down MTTR and improving other key KPIs.
• Access to advanced operations tools and platform — INOC can receive and process alarm or event information from multiple sources and present it in a single, consolidated view for staff to act on. This consolidated view is commonly referred to as a “single pane of glass.” We work seamlessly with all your technical and procedural support systems to fill gaps, enhance current capabilities, and offer entirely new ones. Whether you need simple support augmentation to escalate activities to your engineers or a NOC team that can take a more active role in working and resolving issues, we integrate with virtually any tool, process, or system to help you meet the growing service demands among end-users and customers.
• Easier, faster, and more cost-effective scalability — Rather than training each in-house engineer to become competent and efficient in what might be many technologies, outsourcing to INOC gives you access to a pool of engineers that often already have experience with your technology. Plus, a mature, structured NOC also offers improved efficiency, as the majority of issues can usually be handled by front-line engineers, rather than wasting the precious time of your advanced engineers with simple problems—and burning them out as a result. Thanks to our size and staff, an INOC can rapidly respond to your changing needs to accommodate growth and support new business initiatives, without the management headaches that would accompany such changes in-house, with the additional benefit of making the NOC an ongoing OPEX expense, which conserves budget and lowers upfront cost impositions.
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) — Beyond only looking at the price of outsourced NOC service, it’s important to realize that the value of turning up on an operationally mature, tiered NOC can deliver additional value that stretches back into your organization to lower your total cost of ownership (TCO). Here are just a few ways NOC clients often realize that value in ways that lower TCO costs:
  
  • Lower staffing levels — For new NOC builds, a tiered organizational structure can often lighten initial staffing projections since Tier 1 (and possibly higher tier) activities may not require the number of staff initially projected. For existing NOCs or new builds, the question of opting for a shared versus dedicated outsourced support model can unlock a slew of TCO opportunities onto itself.
  • Better resource utilization — In addition to impacting the number of staff required, INOC can improve the ways your resources are utilized internally. By outsourcing Tier 1 support, for example, engineers and system administrators are freed from the day-to-day minutia to focus on escalated Tier 2 and Tier 3 support as well as new projects—an antidote to burnout and a boost to morale and job satisfaction. Our NOC support framework typically reduces high-tier support activities by 60% or more, often as much as 90%.
  • Easier management — INOC also lifts many of the more general internal management burdens that steal valuable time from revenue-generating activities. With a smaller, more satisfied team focused on the projects that contribute to their personal development and the business’s, managers can enjoy better retention and end the revolving door of hiring. This is just one example of how a well-structured NOC can provide additional value from a management perspective.

The following list captures some, but by no means all, of the types of organizations INOC works with:

Enterprises

• Tech
• Utility
• Finance
• Healthcare
• Insurance
• Retail
• Media
• Government
• Energy
• Manufacturing

Service Providers

• Optical
• Subsea
• Telco
• Wireless
• Data Center
• MSP
• VAR
• Systems Integrator

Technology Vendors

• Network Equipment
• Cloud Provider

Our NOC support clients receive service through one of four models:

• The Shared NOC Support model utilizes our team of over 100 staff to provide NOC support for hundreds of clients. This model offers clients a cost-effective alternative to hiring dedicated resources when low utilization and other factors can’t justify the cost of an in-house or dedicated team. Because the same team supports multiple clients, clients using this model must connect to our support platform.
• In the Hybrid NOC Support model, our shared NOC team handles Tier 1 support activities, but we escalate to specific Tier 2 and 3 specialists that are partially or fully assigned to a specific partner or client for a given period of time—whenever those resources are needed. These advanced staff can use client-specific tools if needed or desired.
• In the Dedicated NOC Support model, a team of NOC engineers lives in one partner or client’s tools all the time—solely supporting their environment within their environment. This model is most similar to a traditional IT staff augmentation model where staff are managed by our team but work exclusively with another organization’s tools and processes.
• In the Designated NOC Support model, perhaps two or three partners or clients are supported by a single, dedicated team. This model is ideal for organizations that require or prefer dedicated resources but don’t have the activity volume to justify having a fully dedicated team all to themselves. This team can operate with the client’s tools, INOC’s tools, or a combination.

As a leader in the NOC services industry, the security of our clients' data and our own is something we take very seriously. 

• ​ISO 27001:2013 is an information security standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the world’s largest developer of voluntary international standards, and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This certification, bestowed on successful completion of a formal audit process, is evidence that INOC has met rigorous international standards in ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer data, systems and infrastructure being monitored and managed by INOC’s Network Operations Centers. INOC has been diligently keeping the certificate current since 2015 and in doing so, we practice continual improvement of our ISMS (Information Security Management System).
• Developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), SOC 2 is an auditing procedure that ensures service providers securely manage data to protect the interests of the organization and the privacy of its clients. SOC 2 defines criteria for managing customer data based on five “trust service principles," including security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. We ensure our data centers are fully compliant in meeting the requirements of each trust principle and undergo regular audits to demonstrate that compliance.
• The NERC CIP (North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection) plan is a set of requirements designed to secure the assets required for operating North America's bulk electric system. The NERC CIP plan consists of nine standards and 45 requirements covering the security of electronic perimeters and the protection of critical cyber assets as well as personnel and training, security management and disaster recovery planning. We support NERC CIP for clients that require compliance. Our operations team is trained and tested to ensure constant compliance on an annual basis. This commitment means all impacted team members understand the importance of this certification to our clients and the relevant security measures that are essential to their operations.