Integrating automation is a crucial step in developing your IT department into a beneficial business contributor to a company. However, automation alone will not achieve this; there also has to be a shift in ideology towards improving the user experience inside the business.

When a traditional Network Operations Center (NOC) is present, the fault response is reactionary, and monitoring focuses on equipment state and roles are usually split between fault resolution and routine maintenance. Pressure on NOCs has never been higher, increasing the requirements of greater network performance while simultaneously reducing downtime puts increased stress on a NOC.

By using a strategic NOC model, the stress implications can be significantly reduced. A strategic model will focus on improving the collaboration between all lines of business, increasing user satisfaction and ensuring that there is an end-to-end quality of the network. This model looks into the application performance rather than the equipment performance. A vital example of this may be that the internet is currently connected, but Office365 is down, this will affect the user experience and decrease productivity despite the hardware states being unaffected.

To facilitate this transition to a strategic NOC, automation is required with the goal to increase user experience (UX) not save on overheads; the emphasis is on improving the UX which leads to increased productivity. This can be exemplified by Visa’s 75% reduction in time to resolve incidents, and JPMorgan Chase’s 75% first call resolution rate (Reference). Both those figures were attained by utilising the core principles that a strategic NOC operates on.

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