The festive season is a time when many businesses close shop for a few days, giving everyone from owners to staff a well-earned rest. However, if your business relies on systems running, overnight processes or a website that’s always accessible, it can feel impossible to fully take a break. Your database environment underpins these operations. It’s vital these critical systems are effectively managed, no matter what time of the day or night.
That’s where WARDY IT Solutions’ Virtual DBA service delivers – and the gift is peace of mind. The team is rostered on shift 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We’re not on call. We‘re on shift, in the building, keeping an eye on every single one of our customers.
Some businesses can’t stop
If your business is retail, hospitality or any essential service it’s likely you can’t ease up over the Christmas period or any public holiday.
If a database issue arises during this time, and your go-to DBA is not contactable, it can add a huge amount of stress to an already pressured time of year. Or if you’re lucky, the issue may go undetected, but this sets up a nasty and unwanted post-Christmas surprise for your IT department.
Some businesses need to keep ticking away
At the other end of the spectrum are businesses that do close down over this period but provide a service that must keep functioning. It could be online orders, donations, queries, or any range of transactions. Online interactions are increasing all the time and your customers often have multiple touchpoints with your organisation.
Not to mention the ongoing data collection and collating that is crucial for your regular reporting, business analysis and competitive edge.
Data is an important asset and your databases need to function irrespective of the time of year.
During the festive season there is an even greater risk as often there are no staff in the building to notice if something goes awry with the database or server.
The quiet achievers of emergency services
Emergency services such as police, ambulance and fire brigade often have to do heavy lifting at this time of year. Those are life and death situations requiring immediate action.
Database issues or interruptions are not of the same gravity but their impact, if unchecked, can be significant. Data breaches, system failures and other events can lead to disastrous consequences. This is why WARDY IT Solutions sees our Virtual DBA team as the quiet achievers of IT services – stopping potential disasters before they happen.
We love this photo of our team enjoying their Christmas lunch while keeping an eagle eye on every one of our clients’ databases.
All in a Christmas Day’s work
It gives us great pleasure to know that our clients can truly take time off at Christmas – or any time of year for that matter – because we don’t.
Our Virtual DBA team shared a handful of database issues they worked on this Christmas season while we were all tucking into our ham and mince pies:
Database Issue 1: Network Timeout
- When: 25/12/2018 – 12:34AM
- Type of Company: Lawyers
- Type of Issue: Nightly Backup Job Failed
- Description: The nightly database backup job failed due to a network timeout.
- Potential Impact: Database backups would not have ran on Christmas morning which could have resulted in permanent data loss if a disk failure or data corruption event had occurred before the Boxing Day backups ran.
- Resolution: Virtual DBA team member re-ran the backup job which succeeded without incident. Issue required no intervention from client.
- Time of Resolution: 25/12/2018 – 3:54AM
Database Issue 2: Insufficient disk space on backup storage drive
- When: 26/12/2018 – 4:41AM
- Type of Company: Non-profit
- Type of Issue: Nightly Backup Job Failed
- Description: The nightly database backup job failed due to insufficient disk space on backup storage drive.
- Potential Impact: Database backups would not have run on Boxing Day morning which could have resulted in permanent data loss if a disk failure or data corruption had occurred before backups were run the next day.
- Resolution: Virtual DBA team member re-ran the backup job which succeeded without incident. Issue required no intervention from client.
- Time of Resolution: 26/12/2018 – 4:41AM
Database Issue 3: Storage Failure
- When: 31/12/2018 – 10:47AM
- Type of Company: Real Estate
- Type of Issue: BDM Load Data Job Failed
- Description: The job failed because of a storage failure
- Potential Impact: The disk that failed stored the data files required for several databases required for the job. Specific business reports cannot run successfully without access to these databases.
- Resolution: Virtual DBA team member investigated the issue and reported it to the company whose Infrastructure Team had to resolve the disk failure.
- Time of Resolution: 2/1/2019 – 9:00am
Get access to this peace of mind all year round
How about you? Did you get a call on Boxing Day saying your systems were down? Or did you walk back into work on the 2nd January making a new year’s resolution never to take time off again? What database problems did your IT team have during their much-needed time off?
Our Virtual DBA clients’ databases were continually assessed and monitored. Even incidents that happened in the middle of the night were immediately picked up and addressed.
Get in touch with us to start a risk-free 30-day trial and maybe this year you can give yourself, your business and your staff the present of true time off with true peace of mind.
