What are the roles & responsibilities of a NOC Technician?

NOC engineers and technicians are responsible for monitoring infrastructure health, security, and capacity within a client’s environment. They make decisions and adjustments to ensure optimal network performance and organizational productivity.

Whenever any action from MSP is required, NOC technicians can create alert and categorize the issue based on severity and other criteria. Depending on the relation between NOC and the MSP, technical teams can work together to resolve the problem.

Additional NOC capabilities include-

• Application software installation, troubleshooting, and updating
• Email management services
• Patch management and whitelisting
• Antivirus scanning and remediation
• Voice and video traffic management

Solving the Skills Gap and Scaling with a NOC

Considering the skills gap, for many MSPs, it is extremely difficult or simply impossible to staff their business with enough techs, that too with the right skillsets which can help their business to grow profitably. And with the great demand for these technicians, the right technicians command a salary that has also grown commensurately, making profit margins even more difficult to achieve while attempting to staff a scale.

However, a NOC eliminates the skills gap by offering all the resources MSP would need in their technical staff. And as MSPs business grows more resources are needed to scale the business.

NOC vs. Help Desk

Despite the many things that a Network Operation Centre is, there is one thing it is absolutely not- a help desk. The big difference?  A help desk interacts with end- clients; a NOC interacts with MSPs.

The NOC provides back end maintenance, problem resolution, and support so that MSP can respond to the issues that are raised and ensure client uptime. The help desk on the other hand- is a call center, designed to field front-line questions directly from end-clients who are actively experiencing some issues. In other words, if an end-user is having a problem, they can call the desk. If the MSP is having a problem, they’ll contact the NOC.

NOC vs. SOC

The key criteria that both a NOC and SOC have in common is that they work with MSP to solve IT- related issues, and never with the end user. However, a NOC will focus on the remote monitoring and maintenance of a client’s IT environment to meet SLAs and ensure client uptime free of client malfunction.

NOC and SOC perform many services- all of its mission-critical value to an MSP- but there is little overlap in their mission or objectives. Rather, by engaging these teams to offer a wide range of services, MSPs receive a greater benefit than attempting to merge the tasks associated with these groups.

The NOC and the Common Platform

TechNEXA deeply integrates its NOC into the core platform, seamlessly delivering a combination of intelligent software and services to create a solution that is unparallel in the industry. This deep integration allows MSPs to grow more profitable than their peers and keep infrastructure costs down by providing a full suite of technology and skill needed to add new clients quickly while delivering exceptional service.