Originally published at www.tothenoc.com
Someone, right now, is building a business case for an in-house NOC. One headline number: an engineer's salary. One conclusion: "cheaper than outsourcing." They're about to be wrong in a way that only shows up at 3 a.m. on a Sunday.
A NOC's whole job is to be watching when nobody else is. That's 8,760 hours a year. One engineer covers maybe 1,800 of them — after holidays, sick days, and sleep. True round-the-clock coverage takes four and a half people before anyone takes a vacation. Not one.
So the real choice was never "salary vs. fee." It's four idle desks vs. coverage you only pay for when it matters.
And here's the part that stings: most of those desks are tier-1 — people who see a red light and forward it. They don't fix anything. You're paying a room to escalate problems to the one person who can actually solve them.
We built ToTheNOC to skip that room.
There's a version of this where in-house is exactly right. There's a far more common version where it quietly bleeds a budget for two years before anyone notices. Which one are you building?
When everything fails, we don't. → the full cost breakdown · why we run no tier-1 team
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