Part of my DBA job is to identify the risk of exposure to no availabilty.  Identifying the risks is one job – the next job is to propose solution to the risks. Budget pressure is everywhere , so identifying high value , low cost  methods of database availability is worth it and good practise.

 Maintaining as close to the agreed Recovery Point Objective (RPO)  and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)  is a DBA objective. Redundancy for SQL Server operates on different levels

There are plenty of suggestions which don’t require big spend but offer good value.. Carefully analyse the process of   setup, maintenance,  security and recovery to identify risks.

Questions such as the following should be asked :

1)       If the agreed RPO is 24 hrs – then why are we spending  £x.000 on the latest Fast Copy solution?

2)       Do we have skilled staff to support these technologies  - in holiday periods or out of hrs?

Steps to create a risk list should be:

1)       What problems\risks can we identify?

2)       What approach will we use?

3)       What is the value\benefit ?

A typical list of tasks to mitigate risk , with minimal financial cost

1) Create documentation. For all aspects of application. Are all relevant people familiar with the process?

2) Security – are you doing a security audit regularly? Are all elevated privileges deleted? Read how to How to create a SQL Server Security Audit

3) Index review – Review Index Usage.  Assists in database size and decreased maintenance window.

4)Backup strategy- does the backup strategy reflect the RPO and RTO requirements?

5) Are all database on the SQL Server instance required?

6)Is there sufficient memory? Check SQL Server Performance ,memory pressure and memory usage