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What are the advantages of services vs employees? Do you really get more value with services?
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Databases sit at the heart of every business application. They are centralized stores of data often with specific functions like finance, CRM or operational data.
They power data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, reporting, applications, and core operations. When databases perform well, the business runs like an engine. When they don’t, everything suffers.
This is why many organisations are increasingly asking:
“Should we hire an in‑house Database Administrator (DBA), or use a managed DBA service?”
For a growing number of businesses, the answer is clear. DBA services provide more value, resilience, and flexibility than relying on a single employee.
In this article, we explore why outsourced DBA services are often the smarter choice, and how they support data, security, automation, analytics, AI, and data migration initiatives.
DBA duties traditionally focused on keeping databases running, managing backups and restores, performance tuning, applying patches and updates and the installation and configuration of SQL database management systems.
Today, the role is far broader.
Modern DBAs must understand cloud infrastructure and hybrid environments, security and information protection technologies, high availability and disaster recovery, data integration, analytics and AI workloads, networking, firewall rules and storage.
This expanded scope makes it difficult for a single in‑house employee to cover everything effectively.
In IT we always plan for redundancy. Hiring a lone, in‑house DBA creates a single point of failure at a critical role in your business. The DBA is the guardian of your data platforms. They are there to defend, protect, recover and maintain the availability of your data for those that are authorized to use it.
By hiring a single DBA you are introducing a single point of failure. If that person, is on holiday, is off sick, leaves the organization, is away training, becomes overworked or lacks experience in a specific area critical knowledge and capability can disappear overnight.
DBA services remove this risk by providing broad and in depth team‑based expertise, shared knowledge, and continuity.
No single DBA can be an expert in every database platform, cloud provider, technology and workload. Some DBA’s are highly skilled in performance tuning others are experts in high availability. A few are great with cloud infrastructure or disaster recovery planning.
DBA services give you access to a team with both a broad and in depth skill set spanning multiple database technologies including performance tuning specialists, security and compliance expertise, migration and data platform modernisation experience
This breadth and depth is especially valuable for organisations running mixed environments or legacy systems.
Hiring an experienced DBA is expensive and if you have one then you really need two which is twice as expensive.
Beyond salary, costs include recruitment fees and onboarding, training and certifications, benefits and pensions, cover during absence and on going costs such as salary and employer taxes.
DBA as a service provides predictable pricing often at a lower total cost than a full‑time employee depending on the size of your data environment.
You only pay for the level of support you actually need which can be standard or even 24/7 support.
Database security is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Some of the biggest ‘hacks’ have all started with insecure database infrastructure.
Our managed database administration service embeds security by default including secure configuration checks, patch and vulnerability management, implementation of role‑based access controls, monitoring and alerting.
This directly supports wider cyber security and information protection strategies.
Modern database management systems are not just data storage platforms, they are performance engines.
DBA services ensure databases are optimized and available for analytics and reporting workloads, AI and machine learning data models, high‑volume transactional systems, very large databases (VLDBs) and data warehousing.
This alignment ensures downstream systems perform reliably whilst maintaining integrity.
An in‑house DBA can’t monitor systems 24/7. A typical workday is 8hours so unless you are running a very large company with multiple offices around the world 8 hours is all you will get. One person is also not going to cover an out-of-hour service in case of an emergency. It is just not possible to put everything on that one persons shoulders.
DBAaaS provides continuous monitoring, proactive performance tuning, early issue detection and faster incident response.
Problems are often resolved before the business even notices them.
Database migration is one of the riskiest database activities but it is required every few years with the new release of the latest version of SQL Server. If you detach and attach database files to the latest version of SQL Server you cannot detach and reattach them to the older instance. Once attached the database files are actually upgraded internally which is a one way transformation so knowing this should inform your migration plan.
Managed DBA services bring proven processes and procedures for legacy system database migrations, cloud database migrations and in place platform upgrades whilst minimising downtime and disruption.
Our expertise dramatically reduces migration risk as we have completed many database migration projects from single instance upgrades to multiyear cluster migrations.
Database needs change as organisations grow. With the cloud comes flexibility and scalability of resources. This allows for flexing up and down of resources to get what you need at a price that fits your budget.
DBA resource that scales easily. Companies grow organically and inorganically though acquisition. As the number of SQL instances and databases in your business grows, we can flex up the amount of DBA resource available to you.
This flexibility is difficult to achieve with employees as a fixed in‑house role. People do not scale instantly but services do.
Internal teams should focus on delivering value often in the form of visible projects to the business, not reacting to database issues and checking backups. These typical DBA duties often get pushed out by the priority of delivering projects. These tasks still need to be completed but it is possible to do that in a cost effective way.
By outsourcing DBA responsibilities you ensure duties are being completed and not pushed aside for projects, keep costs low, access a wider range of DBA skills and enable the ability to scale up and down resource as required whilst shifting left the lower value tasks.
The business benefits from the extra resource and wider skill set available.
There are scenarios where in‑house DBA resource is appropriate particularly in highly specialised environments.
However, even in these cases, DBA services often complement internal teams by providing extended out‑of‑hours cover, additional specialist expertise, wider range of experience from a team that have used different features indifferent scenarios.
It’s not always an either‑or decision and in most cases, more is better.
Are DBA services better than hiring an employee?
DBA as a Service delivers broader expertise, lower risk, stronger security, lower predictable costs, and better support for database migration, analytics, AI.
Rather than relying on a single individual, DBA services provide a resilient, scalable foundation that grows with your business. The team members with the best skill fit are available for the right work.
The security and performance of your databases are too critical to leave to chance and the right data partner can ensure the foundation is in place to turn your data into a competitive advantage.
Started programming in VB 6 at the age of 15. Got into databases for AS and A levels and didn't know that database administration was a job so I went to study Software Engineering at UWE. I just thought database management would be considered 'IT'. I have been a full time DBA since 2010. Love everything data, software development and just tech in general.
