Practice Smart Growth by Switching To A Smart Solution: Remote DBA

The safe and effective handling of corporate data is vital to the survival of any organization. Many critical functions of a company are dependent on the accessibility and reliability of data. Despite growing complexities, databases must remain stable regardless of the resources available to support them. The ultimate responsibility of ensuring the stability of the database environment falls on the Database Administrator (DBA).

A DBA is often pulled in different directions including daily maintenance, monitoring, and implementation of strategic projects. The nature of a DBA’s day-to-day activity is such that the workload is often unpredictable and becomes difficult to plan and execute. An uneven workload is often compounded by the fact that DBAs must also respond to last-minute requests and problems from application developers, system administrators and end users. As databases continue to grow in size and complexity (it is estimated that the quantity of information stored in a database grows at a rate of 300-500% every 3 years), a DBA team is forced to operate beyond its bandwidth capacity and, ultimately, focus is taken away from core competencies.

Because databases undoubtedly grow in size and complexity over time, around-the-clock support is necessary and expected. The challenge of maintaining true 24x7 availability has fueled an ever-growing market demand for remote database administration (remote DBA) to augment in-house staff and realize true, uninterrupted database availability and avoid single-point-of-failure.

Because remote DBA vendors leverage best practices across the customer base, use best-in-class database management tools, and, in some cases, deploy their own proprietary monitoring systems to track all issues and their solutions, such providers offer substantial technical and business benefits. The technical benefits include:

• Regular audits and health check reports to manage and maintain database integrity
• 24x7 DBA monitoring for improved uptime, system availability, and performance
• Use of cutting edge software applications to protect business-critical security issues
• Transfer knowledge to the client’s staff through constant and direct communication, mentoring and training

The business benefits include:

• Cost-effective and expert DBA coverage, with significant savings over in-house resources and/or contracting (average 40% savings in the first year)
• Rapid DBA response and resolution times with custom escalation processes
• Proactive monitoring means finding solutions and preventing problems before they turn into costly expenses
• Offloading of day-to-day maintenance tasks to allow existing IT and DBA staff to focus on strategic issues requiring specific institutional business knowledge

Professional remote DBA solutions not only substantially reduce enterprise database management costs, but also increase database reliability in a more agile and scalable manner than traditional in-house methods.