The Unknown Benefits of Using a DBA Managed Service

Within an IT department there are lots of areas an IT Director can choose to offload to an external provider. However an area IT Directors often miss is the DBA function, but why?

Here are some reasons why you should outsource your Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server support …

24*7 – If you have a few DBA’s then getting them to go on-call and respond is a pain - it also knackers them for work the following day if they get called out. A good managed service will have seamless 24*7 support and won’t affect your resource levels

Scalability – A good managed service will be able to quickly scale up to seasonal peaks, such as Christmas for a retail firm, or the Grand National for E-gaming, then scale down when unnecessary. A managed service will remove the need to hire contractors, or pay overtime to existing staff

Continuity - With 252 working days in a year, added with employee absenteeism, holidays, training and sickness, typically an organisation will only get between 200 to 220 days DBA support with a single DBA. That leaves up to 52 man/days loss of DBA support. This coupled with a 24*7 requirement, means a 145 days without DBA support. 24*7 and absenteeism cover means an internal team of 3 to 5 DBA’s to appropriately manage a fair sized environment. A DBA Managed Service will accommodate this, and show a significant cost saving whilst doing so.

Flexibility – If your technology changes, your service can adapt also without training or procedural changes. Your DBA Managed Service will change by default. All the skills, capacity and project cover will be provided, leaving just the project to be concerned with. For instance, your application commands you to move to SQL 2019 or Oracle 19c – no longer will training and operational learning curve be a pain for when this time comes.

Higher Service and Skill levels - DSP’s DBA’s deal with some of the most complex and demanding environments. The kind of problems a company has supporting an SQL or Oracle data platform, chances are we’ve seen them dozens of times before. Working with a 3rd party like DSP means your DBA isn’t a lone cowboy getting on by with the tools and skills he has in his satchel – our managed service means you get a pool of techies, with the backing of high level Architects from a dedicated Professional Services team. All of a sudden your Data Platform team has 3rd line to go to.

Service Management – This is often forgotten in an enterprise – service management for the Data Platform, incident tracking, problem and trend analysis and other ITIL principles often are kept within the 1st and 2nd line function. With DSP you get this as standard.

Cost – The basic premise of outsourcing is that you share resources with other companies to achieve a cost saving. We manage dozens of customers with 1000’s of databases. Therefore our DBA’s will have the ability to resolve issues faster and work to a regimented process for daily maintenance tasks.