Monitoring and managing Microsoft SQL Server databases can be challenging for many businesses. It takes significant resources and constant monitoring to ensure optimal functioning across a SQL Server database environment, in line with best practices and business goals. Many organizations lack the expertise and time to manage their SQL Server databases. This is where SQL Server Managed Services at Buda Consulting come into play.
Our certified professionals are capable of managing even the most sophisticated SQL Server environments and can take the load of managing your databases completely off your team. Our SQL Server Managed Services offering includes remote administration, performance tuning, upgrades, database security, high availability, disaster recovery, database migrations, and more.
Monitoring SQL Server Managed Services for Security and Performance
Today’s businesses need database performance and security monitoring more than ever. Even in non-regulated environments, organizations need to manage and monitor database access, ensure data is available and protected by backups, and be prepared to respond to potential breaches, including any required reporting. Organizations also need to consider other factors, including permission changes, addition or drop of columns or tables, and unscheduled changes inside the database. All this can take significant time and expertise.
Overall, SQL Server database performance and security monitoring delivered as a managed service help proactively identify and solve problems before they impact operations, while cost-effectively eliminating the constant drain of database monitoring on in-house resources. Managed services can also ensure that your SQL Server environment is safely backed up off-site to reduce the impact of ransomware and other malware attacks.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery for SQL Server
Companies now consider 24x7x365 availability of their web presence or ERP as a critical requirement for keeping up with today’s dynamic competitive environments. Few firms can afford to face significant downtime of mission-critical applications—especially their SQL Server databases. Besides reducing immediate operational impacts, your ability to seamlessly withstand outages, natural disasters, and infrastructure interruptions will elevate your level of business continuity, and thus directly protect your bottom line. Buda Consulting offers high availability and disaster recovery services as part of its SQL Server Managed Services offering to ensure business continuity and peace of mind.
What’s the difference between high availability and disaster recovery? In SQL Server environments, the former focuses on providing 100% uptime and service availability through redundant and fault-tolerant components at the same location. The latter offers service continuity and minimizes downtime via redundant services at one or more separate sites.
The importance of high availability and disaster recovery for any business cannot be underestimated. Downtime costs alone have been estimated in the millions of dollars per hour in some industries. Database downtime is what a CTO’s nightmares are made of, and this could be the result of various causes, e.g., natural disasters, power outages, or hardware/software failures. With Buda Consulting’s SQL Server Managed Services, these risks won’t keep you up at night anymore.
Effective Management of Growing SQL Server Estates
SQL Server Managed Services involve remote monitoring to check resource usage such as I/O capacity, memory, disk space, and CPU to identify trends and predict when more capacity is necessary. Here monitoring provides timelines and history to help reveal whether a stress phenomenon concurs with a specific type of processing like a scheduled data import or a weekly aggregation. At the same time, making expertise available on-demand is critical to rapidly isolate the root causes of alerts and eliminate unanticipated issues like an increase in deadlocks or a performance drop before users experience problems.
As many SQL Server estates grow rapidly larger and more complex, the advantages of managed service expertise to deal with monitoring, administration, health/performance tuning, and troubleshooting across on-premises, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure increase as well. A managed services approach not only eliminates repetitive, manual daily tasks for your team but also enhances the business value of SQL Server database monitoring through expert use of the latest tools and best practices.
SQL Server Installation and Updates
Your SQL Server Managed Services team will collaborate on the initial installation and configuration of new Microsoft SQL Server software. In most cases, a system administrator or other IT/operations team members are responsible for physical or virtual setup and deployment of the new database server’s operating environment, while a database administrator (DBA) installs and configures the new database software. Also, the DBA handles the ongoing maintenance whenever patches and updates are necessary, as these are critical for security and optimum performance. Anytime there’s a need for a new server, the DBA will deal with data transfer from the current to the new system.
Database Upgrades and Migration
If your company is using an older SQL Server version that is holding you back, Buda Consulting’s SQL Server Managed Services can upgrade you to the current SQL Server version or a different version that better meets your evolving needs, such as the ability to leverage newer SQL Server features like Big Data Clusters, improved container support, new in-memory database capabilities, and more.
Migrating databases between SQL Server environments, such as moving from an on-premises data center to a public, private or hybrid cloud, can be challenging even for experienced IT staff. Buda Consulting SQL Server Managed Services can help you reduce delays and mitigate database migration risks while ensuring new environments are correctly configured and deployed in line with best practices and your specific needs—to eliminate data breaches, data loss, and other misconfiguration impacts. We can even help you move your SQL Server databases from your on-premises data center to a managed hosting provider, or help you choose the best hosting options for your critical SQL Server workloads.
Remote Database Administration
For organizations that want to outsource SQL Server database administration but don’t need a full managed service program, Buda Consulting provides remote database administration (remote DBA) services for your SQL Server environment. This level of support is ideal to help many small to midsized businesses (SMBs) address upgrade and patching needs, performance optimization, maintenance, and monitoring. Leveraging our remote DBA service can very often reduce operational costs, enhance system performance, and relieve stress on scarce IT resources.
Let Experienced Pros Handle Your SQL Server Databases
Whether you want to optimize your current database performance, develop a new SQL Server database architecture or evaluate your existing database architecture, or improve security, business continuity and incident response in line with new regulations or escalating stakeholder demands, highly-qualified SQL Server Managed Services from Buda Consulting can help. Certified professionals will work with you to understand your business goals and create an optimized Microsoft SQL Server environment that consistently delivers a broad range of cost, security, availability, performance, scalability and agility benefits to your company.
In today’s fast-changing business environment, SMBs demand more from their data than ever before. If you want to focus on running your business and leave Microsoft SQL Server concerns to a trusted partner, you can rely on the database experts at Buda Consulting to provide SQL Server Managed Services that will maximize your operational efficiency, security and availability while reducing IT costs and business risk.
Contact Buda Consulting today to explore the options and benefits of Microsoft SQL Server Managed Services for your organization.