23 June,2011 by Tom Collins
Outsourcing DBA tasks to an Offshore IT company is complicated task. In a major reshaping of staffing policies last year , I sourced 2 SQL server DBAs – from an offshore IT oursourcing company .
I’m based in the UK – working with the recruitment agent of the offshore IT outsourcing company.
I created the Job Description , sent them , and waited for the CVs to arrive.
Beyond the specific SQL Server DBA related questions, I started considering the broader questions involved with employing an individual from another country - one who I may never meet face-to-face.
- Can problems continue to be resolved quickly?
- Can an offshore DBA participate in team project?
- Are government regulations being met?
- Is the outsourced DBA treating government regulations with the same level of seriousness?
- What are the most effective tasks to outsource? Primary candidates are maintenance, fix packs , managing backup and restore (see comment below for Restore),binary installs, database builds, storage management, basic monitoring, basic housecleaning. In short the Operational \Admin aspect of Operations DBA work
- Primary candidates to NOT outsource include data modelling,SQL query tuning, performance level monitoring, data management, user management, application level expertise
- What policies need to be created for maintenance windows?
- Should Restores be done by a DBA onsite – as it implies an outage , therefore productivity is lost – needing a very rapid response
- How to manage SQL Server security.
- A well defined action list
- Are well documented procedures in place?
- Processes that should be in place – Service Level Agreement(SLA),Change Management, Incident management, Clear Role defined.
- Are metrics in place to measure the productivity against contractual guidelines?
- Confidentiality issue
Outsourcing DBA tasks to an Offshore IT company is based on many factors. There is a massive trend in corporations for offshore IT outsourcing in general – and specifically DBA tasks , come under consideration. My experience so far has been to a)clearly define the DBA tasks for offshore IT outsourcing b)Documented processes
Career in DBA - SQL Server DBA
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