NOC of the Future

With the ever-changing network technology landscape, it becomes essential for every business, whether big or small, to constantly upgrade and manage a Network Operation Center, commonly known as NOC.  It is further accentuated by the massive rollout of networks happening across the globe, especially post COVID, as businesses – Telcos and otherwise – look to support 5G, OTT streaming and other applications requiring higher and better Service Level Agreements (SLA) for consumers as well as Enterprises.

NOC has been traditionally viewed as a support function to businesses that rely on it in avoiding critical disruptions and subsequent time and revenue losses. However, time has come now to start looking at NOC as not just a network troubleshooting center but also a key enabler for business transformation and customer centricity.

Why now?

Every generation of business leaders tends to believe that their challenges are more profound than those endured by previous generations. However, this is not just a perception but a stark reality for NOC Managers of the current generation. The network rollout is going about at an unprecedented pace in urban, semi-urban as well as rural areas and that means the number of elements to deploy, support and manage in the network has become exponentially higher. In addition to Physical Network Functions, the scope of networks and network management is being enhanced to cover Virtual Network Functions (VNF) as well. The introduction of 5G and the evolving dominance of cloud services are all factors that are complicating the issue.

Most companies are responding to this generation of challenges with a mix of efficiency measures - digitization efforts, and productivity improvements being the most common ones. As the NOC managers are looked upon to examine and act on the upcoming business needs, it is important for them to step up, re-organize and adapt around changing business priorities. It must evolve from a supporting function to a strategic partner, with clear KPIs to position the NOC as an enabler of business transformation. 

Building Blocks of the Transformation

As shown in the picture, traditionally, NOC has been employing large workforce monitoring the network elements and interfaces across various Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) devices, Element Management Systems (EMS) etc. deployed throughout the network. The tools used across the processes are categorized under FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security). A few vendors have deployed automated tools to improve operations productivity. However, until and unless these are deployed in an end to end integrated manner, the Return on Investment (ROI) from such pursuits will be limited. Essentially, this means that such automated processes should be managed through intelligent process orchestration and integrated through standards based APIs holistically.

In addition to that, analytics and AI/ML techniques should be considered and integrated to perform Predictive Service Assurance that can optimally perform remediation and restoration tasks to ensure customer experience is not compromised during network faults. These techniques also help in correlating the network alarms with customer impact and hence enabling Service providers to proactively intimate the customers during network faults. Additionally, it helps in minimizing the truck rolls thereby lowering the maintenance costs. That would be a true Autonomous (not only Automated) operation!

The 3rd most important thing to consider in the approach is to make the overall solution scalable. As highlighted in the earlier sections, networks across the globe are becoming vaster and more complex. Hence, its essential to employ specialists for writing domain oriented rule set to perform network incident management in a standardized manner. It is equally important to bring in a data driven approach to create a holistic end to end network schematic while managing the network operations. That will enable the teams to tackle the issues and bring about the network architecture changes in a more consistent and scalable manner.

Summary

It is important to be mindful of the scale of the transformation needed as per the business priorities of the organization. There is no ‘cookie cutter’ based approach to realize the same. The key is for the NOC teams to align with the business priorities and yet, keeping the goals ambitious in tune with future needs. The plan should be carefully chalked out and inclusive of measurable initiatives allowing it to move up the maturity curve at each stage.