Common Network Data Center Issues

An enterprise operations center, also known as a NOC, is typically a centralized place where network operations professionals provide 24x7x365 monitoring and management of networks, servers, databases, firewalls, other network devices, and related external services.

This infrastructure environment can be on-premises or/cloud-based. Due to the complexity of today's networks and services, particularly in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure, EOC staff face numerous difficulties maintaining streamlined communications access between all people involved and having a thorough understanding of the technology itself. Some of the major network operation challenges include:  

Staffing Insufficiencies  

When building an EOC team, specific skills are required, not just a technical understanding of network equipment. Teams need more experienced networking professionals. One may rightly argue for more networking professionals to be employed to solve this challenge, but it's more challenging than it sounds.

Hiring networking professionals is challenging due to many candidates' limited skill sets. Some skill sets most valuable to network operations include network monitoring, automation, security, troubleshooting, and public cloud networking skills. Hiring candidates with all these skills is a big challenge for the team.

Real-time Monitoring and Reporting

Unexpected breakdowns are inevitable in data centers because of the amount of activity there. Applications, cables for connecting devices, network connectivity, power distribution, cooling systems, storage units, and many other things are all active at once. Data center administrators and operators must continuously monitor and report on various parameters.

Uptime and Performance Maintenance  

Monitoring performance and guaranteeing uptime are their top priorities for data center administrators and operators. Along with supplying the overall structure's energy efficiency, this also entails maintaining the precision of the power and cooling systems. In most instances, manually calculating the metrics is of no or very little use.  

Reliability vs. Growth  

Networks are not only expanding in size but also becoming increasingly complicated. This is because more gadgets are connected to networks for many purposes. Distributed networks must therefore expand to support more users.  

With this growth comes more points of failure, which lowers reliability. This is a big challenge to network operations managers as they need help to figure out more ways to ensure that network reliability is not compromised or lost in the growth and expansion of network operations.

Cloud Complexity  

The cloud has become an integral part of the Enterprise Operations Center. Within the enterprise operations initiative, the cloud has overtaken server virtualization. This development has brought its share of challenges for network operations as EOC (Enterprise Operations Center) team struggles with running a multi-cloud architecture.   

With more applications being hosted in the cloud, more network teams are being forced into switching to software-defined wide-area networks to help improve the efficiency and reliability of their WAN. Unfortunately, this new change is also creating many problems for teams as they figure out how their organization can take advantage of the benefits of cloud architecture.