Top 7 Database Improvements Seen When Onboarding New DBA Managed Service Clients

Modern enterprises are evolving and come with unique requirements to ensure data continuity and compliance. Not surprisingly, managed database services are growing rapidly, and managed database service providers are saving the day.

From managing infrastructure and data to ensuring cybersecurity, they help you not just ‘keep the lights on but also partner with you on your data journey. 

The database improvements you see almost immediately will make you realize why having a managed database service made so much sense. 

The role of a competent managed database service provider. 

The equation you share with your provider is very important because the right one will help you navigate to safer waters. You can rely on them for database assessment, monitoring, optimization, performance tuning and troubleshooting, security, compliance, and 24/7 Database Support. 

The amount of data you generate continues to grow and there comes a time when managing it becomes overwhelming without competent people. Besides, data management goes a long way in keeping your databases capable, scalable, and secure. What’s more, they can even help you save because a database crash can cost you tons of money. 

It is up to you to choose the right service provider and discover the myriad benefits the right one can offer for your business. The top ones are iterated below.

We’ve iterated some  the top challenges that may crop up affecting database performance. Read on.

1. A holistic view of your data environment

A holistic view is extremely crucial to make important decisions while planning and prioritizing needs around the data systems. Through database assessment and monitoring, you can accurately define your business goals and system objectives and work on your service level agreements accordingly. Your provider will monitor server and database health to ensure your servers perform well and are always available. 

When you hire a well-managed database service, the provider will assess the environment and analyze configuration, performance, and metadata for the current applications, instances, databases, and servers to get a baseline of the systems. Your provider will proactively identify disruptions to prevent outages and eliminate downtimes. 

You get to reduce operational costs too since you would be paying for a monthly subscription instead of hiring specialists to manage your infrastructure.

2. The power to do more with performance tuning, troubleshooting, and maintenance

Database patching, indexing, and statistics are some of the ways that providers use to track system health. Even if your database server is hosted on the cloud with proper backups and maintenance, there will be other important aspects that need to be managed to ensure the top health of your systems and environment. 

The best providers are experts in troubleshooting to enable optimal performance. The best ones can optimize database instances such as SQL server instances, and code, with skillsets in performance tuning to help you right-size the server instances. What you get are reduced licensing costs and superlative performance. 

3. Seamless management with relevant industry experience

Every industry comes with its unique management requirements based on compliance rules, privacy laws, and industry-specific regulations. A healthcare industry, for instance, will greatly differ from the retail sector, leading,  and having the right service provider that has the expertise and experience to manage your industry-specific requirements can be a boon. 

Apart from being able to manage your systems seamlessly, you will also be able to count on them for complex projects. They would have already handled multiple projects in the past since most industries use similar technology platforms and third-party applications and integrations. So helping you manage your workload by empowering you with the required efficiencies, therefore, is not difficult at all.

Your database managed service provider will also act as your strategic partner helping you attain business growth as per your objectives. Providers often have very dedicated teams to manage your needs and support your initiatives related to data.

4. 24/7 support with minimal downtime

With 24/7 support and on-call options, you can count on their services even on weekends. Make sure that the provider you choose can work in multiple time zones to help you through as and when needed. 

Ideally, there should be one or two database administrators (DBAs) to support your data environment 24/7 all through the year. This will ensure that nothing can compromise it, and in the event of a sudden outage, you can get your systems up and running successfully immediately. 

5. A safe and secure data environment

Security is a priority for enterprises considering that they are perennially at risk from cyberattacks. Through logins, uploads, and other activities, there are plenty of opportunities for hackers to infiltrate. The best-managed database services will build your systems keeping that in mind and monitor it at all times. 

As per the 2020 Cost of Data Breach Report by Ponemon Institute, the average total cost of a data breach stood at $3.86 million in 2020. Among the reasons identified for data breaches, stolen or compromised credentials and misconfigured cloud servers were important ones. Enterprises tend to use several solutions to ensure cybersecurity, but these usually end up causing integration problems, leading to costly, ineffective data silos. 

Your provider will help you incorporate the best-of-breed technology to address the needs of a large customer base through various services such as endpoint protection, application security, continual threat monitoring, continuous validation, data redundancy, encryption for data in transit and at rest, suspicious login and activity monitoring, mass file deletion protection, network protection, and configuration management.

6. Increased agility to adapt

The right provider will help you react quickly and proactively to changing conditions. You can scale up to manage spikes or scale down when there is a shift in demand. As mentioned earlier, right-sizing the instances and database instances regularly based on application workload, resource consumption, and business growth is critical for optimizing the performance. Your provider will reduce IT complexity and help you manage scalability, availability, and workloads effortlessly.

7. A more conducive environment for developers

There is no better way to evolve than with digital transformation and a culture of innovation. When you choose a fully managed database service provider, you also free up the time for your team of developers from managing routine, manual tasks. This helps them focus on their core expertise and objectives, and contribute towards creating better products and accelerating their time to market.

The takeaway

You need to choose your managed database service provider carefully. The best ones will always offer proactive monitoring, maintenance, and alerting. They will understand the best time to run your backups and ensure that you are meeting the SLAs for data loss and recovery times across all servers and databases. They will help you make the right data-driven decisions and give you an edge to meet your business goals successfully. 

Choose managed services from MiCore

Enjoy greater freedom and time to focus on objectives that are critical for your growth. Allow MiCore to help you reduce costs, improve business operations, and create highly available databases for your enterprise.

MiCore offers customizable, managed database services to meet your unique business requirements. Thanks to our many years of experience and expertise, we can manage every database and cater to all businesses, irrespective of the size or vertical. We help you with everything from database cloud architecture to migration and management across AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud maximizing database performance and stability for all sectors.

Allow us to review your business environment. Call us today.  

About Author

Kent Kofman

He is a Principal & Leader at MiCORE Solutions Inc, having 12+ years of extensive experience in Database managed solutions, Proprietary and open-source database implementations and migrations, Cloud migration and management, Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud expertise, Cloud integration services and Specialists in Oracle licensing. He is fortunate to lead a purpose-built organization full of strong, passionate, committed associates to enable Business solutions for organizations by providing managed services and consulting services to help our customers make better business decisions.