The biggest challenge that any IT Manager faces is maintaining and developing return on investment. Not only is it key to make sure costs are kept down, one of the main areas for gaining ROI is looking at the existing operations and seeing how this could be made to work more efficiently. For any IT Manager, Oracle Database management is a significant investment but many are now realising the importance to unlock Oracle’s potential to significantly improve business operations and reduce overall costs in IT.

One way that IT managers can make Oracle perform better is to get specialist help with Oracle and have a complete managed service. This would ensure the maximum return on investment for the Oracle systems, whilst reducing the need to obtain extra in-house resources to manage the DBA.

Reducing the Costs

Have you ever considered the costs associated with having one DBA employee to manage the Database? Typically this can be around £70,ooo per year, not to mention the time lost from absence or administrative cost. There is also the problem of database outages and the required support to have this fixed and maintained. Overall, they can all add up to a significant on-going cost to the IT Manager and not to mention the company. These employment costs that can actually be reduced by a third by having a specialist support contract to manage your database.

Oracle Managed Services

There are many support options available for Oracle database management. Reducing the costs are all about tailored solutions, so that you are only paying for the services that you need for your business. So the support services are there to manage the areas that you can’t and fill the gap of resources in the IT department. A perfect example of the key features of the type of managed services can be seen in the image.

Support services can be done with remote access to monitor the database and management systems to ensure that all critical oracle services are reliable and achieve exceptional database performance. The remote access model is achieve via a guaranteed secure virtual private network (VPN) and can be managed just as effectively as a member of staff in the building.

Before any managed services take place, it is critical that an agreement for the target service levels is set to ensure that the ROI is measureable and achieved. It is the overall running costs that should be reduced as well as the database functionality.

Some of the benefits of oracle managed services include reduced operational costs, reduced employment costs and increased business productivity. There is a lot of support an Oracle  specialist can bring to any IT department and managers should be looking at ways to improve their department’s productivity. For more information about Oracle managed services and the benefits that this can bring to an organisation, there is a White Paper available for download free from Oracle Experts Xynomix.