Situation: Fast growing companies often find it difficult to scale internal IT management to keep pace with database (dB) growth. There are typically 1-3 people in charge of dB management in a small to medium-sized business. Crisis hits when there is an abrupt system shutdown for up to 48 hours and a significant disruption to company operations. How can this be avoided? How do you outsource IT?

Advice from the CEOs:

• The difficulty is that small infrastructure teams often don’t have the range of skills to diagnose dB issues. Calling Oracle, SAP, etc. for assistance gets expensive fast.
• One option is to outsource business intelligence and dB management to a specialist. Quality offshore resources exist that can take over support of company business information (BI) and dB management, offering a full suite of services from anti-virus to preventative diagnosis of subtle misalignments.
• For example, InstaDB replicates the dB in a remote data center so that they can monitor the system for errors, develop solutions, and remotely resolves errors with no interruption to users.
• In addition, some outsourced specialists include calls to Oracle, SAP and so forth as necessary to resolve problems at no cost to the client.
• In a pilot study in a company with 5 servers, the offshore outsource partner provided a full suite of services and was able to increase uptime from 95-97% on a daily basis to 99.97%. This level of performance should be the goal.
• Your outsource provider should have 24/7/365 support services.
• Your provider should provide you with a service-level agreement (SLA) prioritizing issues so that the most critical issues are resolved fastest.

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