Insurance: what you need is generally a balance between type, amount, cost, and where you can find it. Everyone of course has different advice on what is optimal. Best bet is to always get that which will keep you safe, you can afford, and from someone you can trust.
Have you thought about ensuring that you have a contingency plan in place for those technical folks that take care of your database systems?
Over the last 10+ years of my career at XTIVIA providing the Virtual-DBA Remote DBA service we have seen our service applied in many different ways by many unique clients across many industries. One common service model is where the role we are assigned to perform can be best be defined as “insurance”.
If you think about the following scenarios, they can all really be defined as being contingency plans to manage your database environment when something extra is needed, like when you might try to cash in on that insurance policy.
- Coverage when client staff is out of the office (vacation, training, sickness or disability)
- 24×7 coverage when client staff sleeping, rough for one person to be on call 24×7
- Work picks up and client staff needs help sporadically or regularly
- A problem/task arises that can’t be handled by the client staff due to conflicting schedule, heavy workload or lack of expertise
In all the cases above, with XTIVIA you’ve got a team of US based DBAs with remote access and familiarity to your systems, 24×7 availability and the expertise and experience prepared to give you what you need when you need it. For some organizations it’s well worth it to be able to pick up the phone and quickly get expert help with their database environment when they need it. I think that’s called “insurance”.
Of course we don’t just provide the “insurance” type of remote DBA services, we can customize the service to be what fits each client’s need around their Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 UDB or Informix database systems. One of the first things we want to understand with any new Virtual-DBA client is our role in their organization, how the client defines it. Then we work to that end. But I always find myself talking to prospects about the “insurance” aspect of what we do so I thought all of this was worth mentioning. Especially since it seems every other commercial on television is about some type of insurance, but never DBA insurance.