As a Managed Service Provider, your clients may rely on you for all aspects of their IT environment. However, if a specialized issue comes up that your team is unable to handle, you’ll have to decide how to best support your client. We often see this with problems in a clients database that neither the MSP’s subject matter experts can find in the infrastructure, nor applications vendors can resolve.

So, what options do you have when your client ends up having a database issue, but you as a MSP don’t provide dedicated database management services? Depending on how you want to best serve the needs of your client, there’s a range of solutions to handle a client database problem.

Most MSPs rely on a jack-of-all-trades type of system administrator and hope they have enough experience to perform general database administrator duties. While some database issues are simple enough to be fixed with base-level knowledge, it’s a risk to rely on the hope that any database issue your client may have will be simple enough for a general administrator to solve.

An option that some MSPs explore is hiring a dedicated database manager to provide services to their clients. This remediates the problem of dealing with database issues you’re not qualified to handle, while expanding proficiency of the managed service you’re able to provide. However, the cost of a full-time salary and the six months on average it takes to train a hire to full proficiency need to be considered as well.

Since your clients database health is at stake, it’s important to consider the cost and time of hiring an internal database manager. Even if you do decide to hire an internal database administrator, you might need to look into more immediate, temporary solutions as well."

Another MSP could remediate your clients database issues, but you run into the possibility of introducing your client to a competitor. Even though your client will benefit from access to experienced database managers, your team will still be lacking when another issue arises and you may have to send another client this MSP. Eventually this could cause your client to question why they wouldn’t use a vendor with database support as well as their general IT needs.

4. Consult with an outsourced database management team

Another option MSPs have is to partner with a specialized database management company. A trusted partner ensures that your client isn’t being introduced to a competitor but still receiving expert service for their database issue. As well as benefiting your client, your internal staff will also be able to utilize the expertise of a senior partner to add onto their own expert service. Solvaria’s own MSP partner program, MMT4MSPs, makes the trusted process of MMT365 accessible to any managed service provider who does not offer database services as part of its practice.

Ultimately, your company must decide the best way to remediate your clients database issues that aligns with the services you wish to provide. Solvaria’s expert database administrators can help with this decision, however. Contact one of our DBA’s via the form below to learn more about resolving client database issues.