Limited Staff
Even with a full team, managing 24/7 coverage on a campus that operates around the clock is challenging at best.
NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER (NOC)
Enterprise Class Monitoring and Management
A centralized, 24/7 enterprise hub to monitor and manage everything from networks and servers to applications and virtual machines.
CHALLENGE
Infrastructure Complexity and Sprawl
Colleges and universities increasingly depend on technology to deliver teaching, learning, research, and administrative services, yet many IT departments lack the staffing and skills necessary to continuously monitor their technology environments. Growing infrastructure complexity, aging equipment, limited after-hours coverage, and increasing expectations for uninterrupted technology services can leave institutions reacting to outages rather than identifying problems before they impact the campus community.
Network Management Issues Facing Institutional Leaders
Complexity
As complexity increases, with new applications, more sophisticated endpoints, and increasing network traffic, teams struggle to keep up.
Reactive vs. Proactive
Short staffing and skill mismatches lead to slow issue identification, with teams shifting from proactive mitigation to reactive monitoring.
Bottlenecks
Network performance and bandwidth problems persist without planning, impacting connectivity reliability and resilience.
Aging Infrastructure
Complexity increases as systems and endpoints age and vulnerabilities and equipment failures increase.
Alert Fatigue
Excessive false positives, driven by a myriad of factors, pushes team to the limit, impacting performance and turnover.
Visibility
Limited visibility across the technology environment leads to outages, inadequate reporting, and increase response times.
Campus Sprawl
Multiple campuses and remote locations to support, plus disparate network equipment, make transforming the IT experience almost impossible.
SOLUTIONS FEATURES
Real-Time Network Management
The OculusIT Network Operations Center (NOC) serves as a centralized hub and the first line of defense against network disruptions and failures. It delivers an enterprise-class monitoring and management service that analyzes a multitude of IT infrastructure parameters, including health and integrity. It is designed for diverse IT environments, including networks, servers, virtual machines (VMs), applications, and cloud services. Designed for Higher Education and managed by experienced higher education technical professionals, the NOC delivers on the pressing needs of institutions:
Clear Visibility
Visibility across the entire infrastructure, from critical applications to connectivity and endpoints, to ensure a resilient campus.
Proactive Management
Issue detection and action before a point-specific problem becomes a cascading disruption impacting the learning environment.
Efficiency
With a dedicated team who have a broad cross-functional skill set, the operational burden on internal IT teams is dramatically reduced.
Playbooks
By establishing consistent monitoring and escalation playbooks, response times decrease, as does mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Skills Advantage
With a team of more than 300 professionals, OculusIT always has the right resource for the right situation, improving incident responses and troubleshooting.
24/7 Availability
A full team of professionals is available around the clock, not a skeleton crew working on a rotating basis to provide after-hours coverage.
How the NOC Works: From Detection to Resolution
Monitor
Critical Infrastructure and services are continuously monitored against defined availability, performance, and capacity thresholds.
Detect
Monitoring systems identify outages, abnormal conditions, threshold violations, or service degradation.
Validate
NOC analysts, supported by behavioral analytics, review alerts to determine whether an event represents an actionable incident or expected activity.
Investigate
The NOC performs initial diagnostics and troubleshooting in accordance with the agreed operational procedures and playbooks.
Escalate
Issues requiring additional expertise are escalated to the appropriate internal IT team, engineering team, vendor, or other designated owner in accordance with the predefined SOPs
Communicate
Stakeholders receive notifications and updates through the institution's defined communications and ticketing processes.
Report and Improve
Operational data can be used to identify recurring incidents, infrastructure trends, performance concerns, and opportunities for proactive improvement.
RELATED BLOGS
Frequently asked questions
How do we follow up regarding any ticket or issue?
The OculusIT Network Operations Center (NOC) leverages a ticketing system to communicate about, track, and monitor issues. We also hold Daily (IRE/ESA) Infrastructure Reliability Engineering/Enterprise Systems and Applications meetings between technical teams and project managers to discuss and collaborate on tasks and initiatives.
How does OculusIT reduce alert fatigue?
Monitoring can be tuned to meaningful thresholds, window maintenance, service dependencies, and institutional requirements. OculusIT Network Operations Center (NOC) personnel also provide human validation, so internal IT teams are not required to respond to every automated alert.
Can OculusIT integrate with our existing ticketing system?
The OculusIT Network Operations Center (NOC) can align incident workflows with the institution’s existing service management and ticketing processes where supported.