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.

Republished from http://www.sqlserver-dba.com.