Aurora365 White Paper. Establishing a Network Operations Centre (NOC) Culture with Aurora365

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1 with Aurora365

2 1. Introduction While organisations recognise the potential of running their own Network Operations Centre (NOC), it s often assumed that USS Enterprise style control centres are only deployed by the largest network operations. It s easy to understand why an organisation such as Amazon Web Services - that is estimated to run approaching five million servers across its global data centre network depends on its Network Operations Centre; however, surely it s overkill for more reasonably scaled operations? In this White Paper, Aurora365 - the proactive monitoring and management specialist outlines how you don t need to be an Amazon or a Google to reap the benefits of establishing a Network Operations Centre culture in your own organisation. 2. Ensuring uptime with a Network Operations Centre Good IT management begins with an in-depth understanding of the location and performance of all your key IT-related assets. This demands real-time visibility across your entire IT infrastructure, and a commitment to identifying and resolving potential faults before they have a chance to impact overall business performance. Network Operations Centres have a key role to play here, serving as a focal point for monitoring overall network performance and ensuring uptime. Yet NOCs aren t just limited to networks they can also broaden their remit to incorporate tracking of IT security, virtualised infrastructures, systems management, web and other online platforms as well as a range of other assets. NOCs also serve to provide an overview perspective, helping organisations to track and manage service provision across a range of technologies and business areas, bringing different elements together to help reduce service interruptions. However, very few organisations are able to make the initial upfront and ongoing investments necessary to ensure all infrastructure components are fully resilient. This can prove a challenge, particularly as the always-on IT experience increasingly demanded by today s connected users effectively depends on organisations operating a failsafe infrastructure. This is where a Network Operations Centre can play a key role proactively looking out for potential outage events and facilitating an immediate response and effectively offering one of the few guaranteed ways to ensure uptime. 3. Recognising that a comprehensive NOC approach isn t for everyone Nevertheless for many organisations a dedicated Network Operations Centre infrastructure is often perceived as being too complex and prohibitively expensive for their specific needs and budgets. The idea of investing in a dedicated control facility that can dramatically display real-time operational performance via banks of 67 plasma screens can easily seem like overkill. However, just because a full-scale NOC might seem to be an unattainable goal for many organisations, that doesn t mean that they still don t want to secure the kind of operational 2

3 benefits that come from effective infrastructure monitoring. Whether that s spotting potential hardware issues and replacing components long before a fault, or tracking bandwidth to ensure consistent uptime and service provision. Even smaller organisations can gain visibility into the availability and performance of their networks by creating their own NOC approach. 4. Successful NOCs aren t just about the physical investment While only larger organisations might have the resources necessary to create a dedicated Network Operations Centre infrastructure, it s not essential to invest in a state-of-the-art physical resource full of expensive high-tech equipment to get your own NOC approach up and running. You can actually create your own Network Operations Centre just about anywhere, and still succeed in creating a monitoring environment that provides a framework for effective issue tracking and trouble-shooting. Central to this is a commitment to creating a NOC Culture within your organisation with this in place you can then investigate how to put that culture into practice. For many businesses, building an element of intelligence into their existing infrastructure monitoring investment can provide an important foundation for delivering Network Operations Centre style functionality. Specifically, organisations can add NOC value to their infrastructure monitoring by tuning specific alerts and their responses to them. By defining the correct dependencies, rules, alerts, escalation processes and automations, organisations are now able to achieve NOCstyle performance levels at a fraction of the cost of building their own bespoke Network Operations Centre. 5. Adopting an intelligent approach to creating your own NOC Culture Of course, overly complex monitoring can also start to negatively impact the performance of systems, leading to potential network bottlenecks, too many warnings and the inevitable cry wolf effect. Over monitoring can also lead to excess infrastructure adjustments, particularly as IT teams attempt to keep pace with incorrect tuning parameters. That s where it s important for organisations to work alongside a specialist partner that understands the requirement to build the right kind of intelligence into your Network Operations Centre approach. Smarter infrastructure monitoring systems, for example, can eliminate the noise caused by significant outages by alerting conditionally as to which component has actually failed instead of over-reporting based on the subsequent systems and processes that could be indirectly impacted. At Aurora365 we believe that adopting a NOC Culture requires organisations to build intelligence into their existing infrastructure monitoring investment. However, to achieve this it s important for businesses to adopt a highly pragmatic NOC build ethos, and Aurora365 has created a 9-point NOC Culture methodology to help deliver such an approach. 3

4 Aurora365 s 9 steps to NOC Culture cover: A clear focus on end to end service uptime by intelligently grouping applications, server and network infrastructure Deploying an automated break/fix regime for faults and issues that keep reoccurring particularly important for 24x7 deployments Noise Elimination intelligently separating informational events from service impacting incidents Seasonal drill down recognising that it s important to always put focus where it is required and when it is needed Alert ownership operating alerts conditionally and with clear responsibility for resolution helps avoid the bystander effect where too many expensive resources are getting involved Ensure 24x7 cover 24x7 cover is important, but there are practical ways of achieving it. Exploit ultra reliable pager mechanisms while also blending in appropriate support from the Aurora365 24x7 NOC team Escalation automation NOC Culture is all about effective risk management that s why it s important to take advantage of the latest escalation management techniques Have all the right Good Housekeeping techniques in place it s particularly important to keep on top of historical alerts, removing any that are completed to retain focus on current issues Cross system integration ensuring that you take full advantage of other monitoring tools and ticketing systems to reduce manual tasks and improve monitoring accuracy By following these 9 Steps to NOC Culture, and by helping organisations to define all the correct dependencies, rules, alerts, escalation processes and automations, Aurora365 can ensure that when things do go wrong incidents are given ownership through to resolution. And that s what establishing a true NOC Culture is all about driving uptime and performance through the right active monitoring and approach. 6. Creating a platform for an effective NOC Culture with Aurora365 At Aurora365 we believe that good IT management starts with knowing where your systems are and how they are performing. Our powerful, flexible and affordable infrastructure monitoring approach provides real-time visibility across your entire IT infrastructure, finding and fixing faults before they can impact your business. Aurora365 serves to provide timely notifications to both your designated contacts and our own agents simultaneously providing your operations team with the confidence that we are aware of any service issues that may require us to dispatch an engineer ahead of our customer s support team getting in touch. The net effect of this combined infrastructure monitoring and managed services approach is comparable to an organisation having its own manned Network Operations Centre (NOC) allowing a marked reduction in downtime. And because Aurora365 can be provisioned as a Managed Service, organisations can begin to establish their own NOC Culture quickly in a way that precisely matches their own inhouse skills profile and coverage needs. 4

5 7. Helping to shape a NOC Culture for Plymouth University One organisation that is working with Aurora365 to help adopt its own NOC Culture is Plymouth University. They have a clear commitment towards providing an always-on Student Experience for their 30,000 users across its multiple sites. According to Plymouth University s Head of Service Management, Gary Bayliss: Universities are one of the most demanding IT infrastructure environments, so it s been particularly important for us to take advantage of Aurora365 s proven NOC expertise to help us really track all the key performance elements that go towards creating a best practice Student IT Experience. For Plymouth University, effective service management is all about mitigation of risk, and Aurora365 has been instrumental in helping us to shape our NOC Culture ensuring we re in a position to react much more quickly when issues arise. Gary Bayliss, Head of Service Management at Plymouth University Plymouth University first deployed Aurora365 to monitor the performance of its Cisco network in 2013, and added uptime assurance for its extensive estate of IT servers and web applications in The advanced levels of proactive monitoring and management enabled by Aurora365 were central to the University being able to promote its comprehensive 24-hour Open for Business IT SLA to its staff and students. 8. Build out your NOC Culture with Aurora365 Few organisations have the resources available to employ full time monitoring agents in a dedicated 24x7x365 NOC setup. However, this limitation doesn t mean that they can t adopt NOC technology, and build within its operation the essential cultural practices that underpin how a NOC team responds to live service issues, where necessary using Aurora s NOC as an extended hours backstop. For businesses that don t possess sufficient critical mass to employ full time monitoring agents in a dedicated 24x7x365 NOC, Aurora365 enables organisations to introduce a highly effective NOC Culture. Powered by Aurora365 s people, processes and technology, our customers get to realise their own NOC at a fraction of the cost. Increasingly our customers adopt Aurora365 with the ambition of building out their own NOC function. Through working with us they can take advantage of our people, proven process expertise and technology assets to devise a NOC strategy that is matched to their specific uptime targets. They also receive the benefit of our NOC-building expertise, which - put simply - delivers the NOC Culture, essential for networking success. 5

6 9. Aurora365 in-depth NOC experience Established in 2013, Aurora365 was developed by IT specialists with first-hand experience of the networking operations challenges faced by IT professionals. Dependable IT is critical to the success of your organisation, and Aurora365 s ethos is to take away the worry of uptime and user experience so that you can focus on growing your business. We understand that to properly manage your entire IT Infrastructure 24/7/365 you need access to the right fully skilled team. Aurora365 is an affordable infrastructure monitoring and management service that frees up IT department time, leading to optimal IT performance and greater business performance. Our Solutions are built across Cloud, On-Premise and Hybrid platforms with options to manage customer owned technologies. Through our flexible service models, our customers gain competitive advantage by having access to IT monitoring experts at the heart of their Infrastructure, allowing them to deliver the customer experience that previously they would have been unlikely to budget for or achieve. With the Managed Service option customers can rest assured knowing that Aurora s expert team can act as a single point of contact, monitoring the entire IT infrastructure 24/7/365, and delivering proactive problem resolution before faults and outages impact their business. Contact Aurora365 to start building your NOC Culture today, or to request a demonstration. Simply call us to find out more on or [email protected] to have an Aurora specialist contact you at your convenience. Aurora365 is accredited on the UK Government s G-Cloud Framework. Tel: +44 (0) [email protected] All rights reserved. 6