Newsletter June 2008
NOC, NOC. Who’s HERE?..the NOC!
by John Stephens
NOC, NOC.
Who’s there?
The Convergence Networks NOC.
The NOC?
All joking aside, you might find yourself wondering ‘what’s a NOC.’ Well, NOC stands for Network Operations Center, and it’s the latest development in the evolution of Convergence’s support model, designed to ensure the highest levels of service responsiveness and effectiveness. Here’s a brief tour.
While we’ve been thrilled with our Support Pods, we’re not ready to call it quits yet—there’s always room for improvement. That’s where the NOC comes in, providing a host of services to all our clients including monitoring, patching, application and solutions deployment, and resource management. These are all functions that are imperative to a good IT infrastructure, and that’s the mission of the NOC. In the NOC, we have specialists dedicated to “watching the dials.” They spend their time making sure critical services are available, ready to alert our support pods whenever services fail. They also identify when hard drives are failing BEFORE they fail, allowing us to get a replacement drive ordered and installed before any data or productivity is lost. They watch backups. They push the Windows updates that keep systems safe. All in all, the NOC is the group that tells our support staff what you’ve got “under the hood,” how it’s running, and when it’s time to upgrade.
After reading the above paragraph, you might be thinking of the NOC as the folks who support the folks that support you, our customer. A lot of what the NOC does is behind the scenes, true, but there are some instances where you’ll see them, or at least their actions, directly. A perfect example happened just a week or so ago when a nasty virus came out. This was a “zero-day” attack against which antivirus products weren’t able to react. After our support teams researched the root cause (a security vulnerability in a commonly-used browser plug-in), the NOC was able to code the necessary version update to the software, allowing us to deploy preventative patches to all our customers overnight. The result was client networks that were safe, secure, and blissfully unaware of the potential for infection that was averted—a quiet victory with a significant impact. Sometimes our NOC guys aren’t quiet, though. Some of you may have noticed a new pop-up message, prompting you to reboot your computer to finalize updates. That’s a tell-tale sign that the NOC has been busy at work, applying security and functionality patches and updates from Microsoft that are designed to keep your system running cleanly and efficiently (not to mention securely). It happens once a month, but once it’s done, it goes away for another month. There’s a picture of the pop-up below. But, try not to think of the NOC as the bad guys behind this insidious message—instead think of this little pop-up as an indicator of a safe, secure, and happy computer. A simple reboot on your part, and now your system can support you for the next month or so (until more patches).
So, while I know this was a short tour, I hope you’ve gleaned some understanding of our newest support unit, the NOC. They work quietly behind the scenes, but by doing so, they keep your computers quietly working. And now, back to the NOC-NOC jokes…
If you would like to receive more information simply contact us.
What People Are Saying
- “The staff at Converge Networks has helped our organization become more efficient and effective. Whenever there is a network question, the Convergence service team is thorough and thoughtful about the support they provide. Convergence Networks is an excellent IT solution and is a part of what makes our organization successful.”
- Terri Sorensen, Executive Director, Friends of the Children – Portland