Network Operations

What is Network Operations? & Best Practices

Network Operations refers to the activities performed by internal networking staff or third parties that companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage, and respond to alerts on their network's availability and performance. Staff that have primary responsibilities for network operations are often called network operations analysts or network operations engineers.

A Network Operations Center, often called a NOC (pronounced "knock"), is typically a centralized location where the network operation staff provides 24x7x365 supervision, monitoring, and management of the network, servers, databases, firewalls, devices and related external services. This infrastructure environment may be located on-premises and/or with a cloud-based provider.

Some key Network Operation activities are:

• Network monitoring
• Incident response
• Communications management (Email, voice, & video)
• Performance, quality, and optimization reporting
• Software/firmware installation, troubleshooting and updating of network elements
• Patch management
• Backup and storage
• Firewall management
• Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and other security tool deployment and monitoring, in collaboration with Security Operations
• Threat analysis and blast radius analysis in collaboration with Security Operations