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Outsourcing DBA tasks to an Offshore IT company

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.

 I considered these factors

 -          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

Read More on DBA

SQL server – Onshore DBA

Career in DBA - SQL Server DBA

 


Author: Tom Collins (http://www.sqlserver-dba.com)


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