There’s never a convenient time for a database emergency. When bad things happen to critical database systems—like alarming error messages, poor performance, potential data loss, or a possible security breach —you need to troubleshoot and mitigate the problem fast.
Keep a Trusted Oracle Database Expert on Your Team.
One: Time is money
Time is certainly money when critical systems are offline. User productivity is zero, customers can’t connect, your reputation is sinking, and so on. Research puts the true cost of IT downtime at somewhere between $2,500 and $9,000 per minute for SMEs ($150,000/hour and up) on average, depending on your industry, business size and other factors.
Even if you guesstimate your actual downtime costs would fall below that range, how many minutes of downtime would it take before whatever DBA service agreement costs you saved are consumed?
Further, you can expect an emergency Oracle Database expert service to charge a premium to save the day. And no matter how good they are, they will be starting with no knowledge of your business or your systems. You’ll be paying a high cost for their ramp-up time.
A trusted remote DBA partner will already know your database environment, so they can potentially solve your problem in less time while also charging less for their time.
Two: Who are these people?
When your critical data is inaccessible you don’t have time to run background checks. If you’re cold-calling an emergency Oracle Database expert, how do you know you can trust them (and whoever is working for them) to keep your sensitive data private? Will their monitoring and support techniques comply with regulations you’re subject to? Do you even know for sure what country the people who will be remotely accessing your systems are located in?
You don’t want to compound a data access crisis with a compliance blunder and/or security breach.
When you have a service agreement with a trusted DBA partner, you’ll know from experience that they are trustworthy, what measures they keep in place to preserve your security, how they address your compliance requirements, and so on.
Three: Proactive trumps reactive
Many third-party DBAs offer proactive service packages that will detect and correct many impending issues before they crash your database or otherwise impact users. This “extra insurance” of a wise eye on your database environment is another big advantage to having a working relationship with an Oracle Database expert. Versus a “break-fix” approach on an expensive emergency basis.
If an emergency does happen on your DBA partner’s watch, they probably offer 24×7 on-call assistance. So, they can start addressing mission-critical production database problems within minutes. Which is most likely faster than starting from scratch looking for a service provider.
Next steps to Finding an Oracle Database Expert
If your critical production databases are not currently protected by an on-call Oracle Database expert, contact Buda Consulting to explore how our DBA support options can enhance your business performance and IT continuity.
Ask us why we never charge for emergency response when you have a service agreement with us. And ask us why you will always have at least two U.S. Based Database Experts that know your environment.