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Top 5 Benefits of Outsourced NOC Services to IT Department

Outsourcing isn’t just a good-to-have accessory anymore. Instead, it has graduated to become a necessity that steers a business’s success in the long run.

Managing Your Network Operations Center (NOC) isn’t an exception for having you to grow your business ! As an enterprise, you deal with countless technologies, devices, systems, etc. Of course, you need all of them to survive and thrive. While that’s true, one cannot discount the challenges you encounter in handling them, ensuring upgrades, and optimizing their uptime. For this one needs a dedicated team to manage this better.

It is here that an Outsourced NOC services help. But in what ways? Shift Ahead, is one of the leading outsourced NOC service providers, discusses five benefits as given to our existing customers.

5 Top Benefits of Outsourced NOC Services

Here are five ways your company can benefit from outsourced NOC services.

1. Reduced IT Costs With Quality As Top Most Priority

To a company looking to outsource NOC services, costs matter as much as how efficient the IT support works. Outsourced NOC services has proven to be commercially beneficial in multiple ways.

The first advantage is eliminating the need to hire full-time dedicated resources to handle the NOC aspect. Hiring isn’t done for free. Searching for the right talented resources, interviewing them, and onboarding is as arduous as managing employee administration and management costs. Outsourcing relieves you of all these costs and upfront Infra build up costs !

Another benefit is continuous monitoring, which helps NOC professionals constantly to watch the system and identify potential downtimes, threats, failures, etc.

An unforeseen maintenance or breakdown could cost the company money, projects, and reputation. Outsourcing helps prevent such potentially precarious situations.

2. 24/7 Technical Support & Reach for your customers

Your in-house team would dedicatedly serve you during working hours. But what about problems that surface beyond them? Not having anyone to address those issues could intensify them and lead to more critical damage!

But outsourcing NOC services can let you have a team that works round the clock and continuously monitor your IT network. No matter whether a problem is within working hours or beyond that, network-related problems will be addressed promptly and accurately with experts working around them.

3. Access to Specialized NOC Resources

Having your existing IT team handle the NOC aspect might not necessarily prove effective. If the team members aren’t well-versed in the practicalities of NOC management, the result could be errors and critical situations.

Thanks to outsourcing, you don’t have to live with these challenges. With outsourced NOC services, you can access specialized and experienced resources. These people can help you resolve complex situations, provide diverse insights about better NOC management, suggest improvements, indulge in staff training, etc.

4. Reduced System Downtime

System downtime is a significant concern many companies worldwide confront. Downtimes not only incur a loss of precious person-hours but cost companies their reputation in the market. They could lose the project and pay huge monetary penalties, especially if and when the investigation reveals that the problem was unavoidable.

Outsourced NOC services help reduce system downtime via continuous monitoring and proactive measures. Together, both can help identify potential threats and minimize the time, threat, and, therefore, the risk associated with system downtime.

5. Better Focus on the Core Business

Better IT management isn’t an afterthought anymore. Business owners have to include it in business planning, budgeting, and strategy. Considering NOC, a crucial part of IT infrastructure management, outsourcing it to an expert outsourced NOC service provider helps you increase your bandwidth and lets you focus on your core business. You don’t have to micromanage things as you might have done while handling the function in-house. You can now have more time and energy to look at your business.

Get A Step Closer to Achieving IT Excellence with ShiftAhead’s “Never Regret” Outsourced NOC Services

Don’t live with the struggles of in-house NOC management. Take a step closer to managing IT even more efficiently with ShiftAhead’s outsourced NOC services!

Some of our services include 24/7 network remote monitoring, L2/L3 handling, phone handling, customer responsiveness, proactive checks, etc. Our results include increased system uptime, reduced NOC operational costs, and increased network efficiency.

Write to us at info@shiftahead.tech to learn more or discuss your needs with our experts.

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Cloud Ops is Never Easy, But Immense Benefits

Cloud Operations (Cloud Ops) is a challenge for many organizations due to several reasons. Here are a few reasons why Cloud Ops can be challenging for all:

1. Complexity: Cloud computing involves multiple layers of abstraction, including infrastructure, platform, and software as a service. Each layer has its own set of tools and technologies, making it challenging to manage and maintain.

2. Scalability: Cloud Ops requires organizations to manage their infrastructure and applications at scale, which can be difficult to achieve without proper planning and processes in place.

3. Security: Cloud environments are vulnerable to security threats, and managing security in the cloud can be challenging due to the complex architecture and the use of multiple services.

4. Cost management: Cloud services can be expensive, and managing costs can be challenging. Organizations need to monitor their cloud usage and optimize their resources to avoid unnecessary expenses.

5. Continuous integration and delivery: Cloud Ops requires continuous integration and delivery to ensure that new features and updates are deployed quickly and efficiently. This can be challenging to achieve without proper automation and testing processes in place.

6. Monitoring and troubleshooting: Cloud Ops requires real-time monitoring and troubleshooting to identify and resolve issues quickly. This requires specialized tools and expertise, which can be challenging to acquire and manage.

In summary, Cloud Ops can be challenging due to its complexity, scalability, security, cost management, continuous integration and delivery, and monitoring and troubleshooting requirements. Organizations that are able to address these challenges effectively can leverage cloud computing to enhance their business operations and achieve their goals.

#CloudOps #Cloudchallenges

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Why Outsourcing Makes Business Sense

In today’s business climate, many companies are considering outsourced IT services and projects to India, some as a captive center (employment of own Indian staff), while others choose traditional BPOs such as Wipro or Tech Mahindra.

Most often, these decisions are made because of the economic advantages India offers, but I would also add the availability of qualified resources is an understated benefit.

A challenge for decision makers is to benefit from lessons learned from other companies that are not typically willing to share their failures. This blog post is my brief attempt to explain what I learned through the creation of 7 separate teams through the creation of multiple Indian companies, securing offices, and building out high-performance teams.

The first issue you need to be intimately aware of is cultural differences which one can adapt to real quick.

- In most cases, there is tremendous time pressure internally to offshore services or projects. The consequence is that knowledge is not properly shared which is the number one reason efforts fail & derail at times.

- A lack of understanding of Indian culture and not training your staff on the differences will remove any benefits in the economic factors that drove you to outsource. If budgets allow, I suggest recycling Indian staff to the US and US staff to Indian shores so that one minimizes these risks.

- For providing outsourced IT services, strong management and fully dedicated sponsorship are crucial to enable fast decisions and clear direction. The bigger the offshore outsourcing initiative, the more important it is to have the right management in place.

- Wrong decisions and lack of communication can easily result in a transfer back onshore. This is true whether you are utilizing a BPO or hiring your own team to build products or services.

- I prefer a hybrid having my own team augmenting with BPOs as peaks in workloads develop. My biggest reluctance toward the traditional BPOs beyond the premium costs is the pressure to utilize their bench.

- The pressure to get bench folks billed is how I feel resources with non-ideal skills end up on a team. I truly prefer hiring my own employees so that I know they are in the same boat as me. I have found that there are a lot of smart people in India, but a key factor I also look for is attitude.

- Attitude is very difficult to teach. When hiring a team, one should typically go to India and set up camp. It is not unheard of for me to interview 30 – 40 people for a key position. There are India-specific factors I have found to exist when hiring that are not typically present in the US.

- It is customary for a person to give 30 – 60 days’ notice in India to their existing employer. A lot can happen in that amount of time and often results in a no-show. My experience has shown that going there and looking the candidate in the eye and shaking their hand gets the job done.

- Hiring over the phone or skype often results in undesirable outcomes. Although there are a lot more points that warrant discussion, I wanted to touch on a few key issues to spawn the desire to learn more if offshoring is a current consideration for you.

In short, getting the right team & the people are the soul of any outsourcing initiative as they really work well, at least for most

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Why Dedicated NOC/Tech Resources Make The Difference

Outsourcing is done essentially to save costs and give the company to focus on business & sales increase. Increase your sales costs and reduce support cost, ensuring the quality and spread of support is enhanced significantly. In this scenario more than just the support required, the focus has to be on the customer and his satisfaction with what he gets overall. Here only a good Managed Service Provider can get that for you.

Dedicated & Committed NOC Tech Resources make a big difference for a company that has say over 20 tickets a week spanned over 12-16 hours. Why it is so important, have just put in our thoughts based on a decade-plus of experience in this managing of customers world over.

1) Hurdles in shared - Risks are high in a shared model as the technician/engineer even if he managed 3-5 tickets for multiple customers has to align his thoughts while he works. Focus generally lags

2) More Works in One Resource - A customized dedicated model which is beyond just provisioning for customers – it can involve much more than just supporting tickets

3) Flexibility & Scalability - Dedicated Engineers at Shift Ahead are flexible and basis our experience more talented and versatile with their on-the-job tasks – tickets to managing escalations are done much better

4) Versatility matters- Tools used are generally client specific and dedicated resources are more focused on working with one client and their overall service deliverable tools effectively.

5) Advantage Dedicated Resources - Shift Ahead being a leading outsourced NOC services provider has resources that can manage tickets as well as manage client escalations

6) Cost Hardly Counts - Cost difference between a shared & dedicated resource is just 30% as costs of operating are only shared and the challenges of managing different customers for a resource are significant

7) Knowledge Upkeep - Importantly knowledge is shared and can be a detriment when it comes to situations when a person leaves and can become a hurdle during scale-up of operations

8) Privacy – In the shared model, privacy is not maintained as respective customer information can give rise to conflict in one’s interest

9) Controls-In a dedicated model, the client has complete control of its working techs which makes a big difference as workloads are better managed it may be ticket management, incident management, provisioning, or engineering managed Resources.

Shift Ahead Technologies provides the right impetus at half your current cost and with a significant amount related to quality & international expertise which matters

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