What IT Leaders Should Look for in Database Managed Services

Companies consider database managed services for a variety of reasons:

• Your current staff doesn’t have the right skillset.
• During a recent acquisition, you inherited an application that is written for Oracle and all you have is Microsoft SQL talent.
• You’re considering hiring new employees, but they are hard to find.
• Your existing DBA needs help so they can focus on other projects.

As organizations face the typical ups and downs with projects, managed services can scale to meet your needs. They can improve productivity and take away some of the stress of overworked DBAs and ensure your database and application are available 24/7. However, in order to obtain these benefits, you need to find a database managed services provider that can meet your unique needs.

What to look for in a database managed services provider
Here is a list of 7 things you should look for in a database managed services provider to ensure they can meet your unique needs:

Do they have experience dealing with your databases?

It is imperative to find a managed services provider with experience with your specific databases. Maybe you have Oracle for one application and Microsoft SQL Server for another. If you’re going to build a long term relationship with a managed services provider, they need to understand your specific database needs. You’ll also want to make sure they have experience with architecting, analyzing, monitoring, storage and warehousing.

Do they invest in employee training?

Are their employees staying up-to-date with the latest database releases? They need to have systems in place to allow their team to stay up-to-date. You should ask them about their commitment to on-going training.

Will you get access to senior-level database experts?

Database managed services should give you access to senior-level people. This lets you benefit from high-level talent without hiring them full time.

Do they offer 24×7 database monitoring?

In order to sleep well at night, you need to know your valuable data is safe. This can only happen when it is continuously monitored so you know that your systems are working properly. If a problem occurs, database monitoring should detect failures and send notifications for remediation. This monitoring can also improve security by allowing admins to monitor who is accessing data.

Do they have versatile contracts that meet your specific needs?

Your company is unique and so is your data. This is why you need a versatile contract that meets your specific needs. You need to be able to fully understand their contracts so you know the services you are receiving. As your needs change, this contract may need to be updated. They should allow you to scale up or down depending on the needs of your business.

Can they scale to meet your unique needs?

Is the database managed services provider able to increase or decrease support to correspond with peak times in your business? For example, retail companies might need more support around Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

How responsive are they?

Modern businesses need quick response times. Of course, you can ask how responsive they are. But often, a more reliable method is to talk with some of their customers to see what they say about the service provider’s responsiveness.

Conclusion

Database managed services let your employees focus on their core competencies and deliver new products. It allows you to determine what is important to your company’s growth and focus on the right things.

Would you like to learn more about how database managed services can help your business? Fill in the form below.