Modern businesses are data-driven. Many business leaders will tell you it is the “lifeblood” of their company. Good data helps us provide outstanding service to our customers, identify potential new clients, generate sales leads, track competitors, improve business processes and so much more. You would think that protecting and optimizing this precious data would be the #1 business priority. Yet we regularly hear of disastrous security breaches and catastrophic database crashes. These seem to happen to everyone from airlines to government departments – and they destroy public trust as well as reputations. Prevention is better than cure We all know that eating well, exercising regularly and getting enough sleep is the best way to stay healthy and minimize the risk of serious illness. Similarly, we know it makes sense to look after our homes, our cars and even our bicycles. That’s because neglecting your own health or your car’s annual maintenance can have serious consequences. Failure to maintain your SQL database can be just as serious. Misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities will put your data – even your whole organization – at risk. That’s why effective database management has to be about more than reacting to issues and disaster recovery. Proactive management must involve performance monitoring and regular health checks. You can use these to identify potential problems and optimization issues before they turn into business inefficiencies or a PR disaster. Here are the three questions a database health check should answer: 1. Are your servers and databases optimally configured? Businesses lose thousands of work hours every year because of poorly performing databases. The most common complaints to IT helpdesks are to do with slow databases, frequent glitches or difficulties running timely and accurate reports. Such problems tend to indicate a database is sized incorrectly, is deadlocked from too many high consuming processes running during business hours, or is configured incorrectly. These problems are frustrating for your employees. They also mean your IT team has to spend time fire fighting and troubleshooting, rather than working on higher value development work. Moving from a reactive to a proactive approach to database management is the best way to avoid disaster. 2. Do you have the right data security controls in place? Do the right people – and only the right people – have access to each area of your database? Credit card numbers, for example, should not be available to everyone. A database health check can show the access configurations and give you the information you need to prevent PR disasters and GDPR non-compliance. 3. Is your back up configuration as effective as it could be? Losing customer data is a nightmare for any company. Even having out of date or incomplete data is frustrating for your customers. If data is the lifeblood of your organization, then your database is its heart. When this vital asset is running efficiently, your employees and your customers will be satisfied, and your team will be able to boost sales and track the profitability of each client. As an IT manager, you need to have all your database health information to hand at all times, so you can see at a glance if there are any issues. Are you confident your database is as healthy as it could be? Our Health Checks identify current and potential issues with your database. Get in touch and we’ll be happy to show you how this works and answer any questions on how to optimize the health of your SQL database.

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