Cost Savings in Database Administration: A Critical Yet Overlooked Opportunity

Database management is often an underappreciated aspect of IT. Many picture DBAs tucked away in a company’s basement, working behind the scenes—only noticed when the database goes down. However, the reality is that managing databases involves handling complex demands, and when neglected, it can lead to significant costs. Unlocking cost savings in database administration requires a deeper understanding of modern tools, licensing strategies, and optimization opportunities, all of which are frequently overlooked by organizations.

Despite advancements in technology, many companies still rely on outdated database management practices and metrics from 20 to 25 years ago. As data volumes and the number of applications depending on them increase, inefficiencies accumulate. Insular teams often miss opportunities for cost savings through licensing optimizations or modernization efforts. With mission-critical systems at risk, downtime or degraded performance means lost transactions—or even halted operations—adding further financial strain.

Aging database architectures and inefficient code exacerbate the problem, pushing companies into a cycle of rising capital expenditures and operational costs. These bloated legacy systems increase licensing fees and present resource management challenges. Worse, businesses hoping to realize cost savings by moving to cloud-based consumption models often carry these inefficiencies with them, creating unforeseen expenses. Without proper planning, cloud migrations can escalate costs, nullifying the anticipated benefits of scalable pricing.

How a MSP Can Provide Cost Savings in Database Administration

Fortified Data has worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of databases. Clients often seek our expertise to manage their environment, improve performance in their systems or migrate to cloud-based databases. We typically find that data estates oversized by 50% than required to operate safely and efficiently.

That means excess costs in licensing, compute, database instances and storage. Further adding to the wasted costs, the licensing is likely inappropriate for the databases operating under those licenses. Performance tuning the databases and optimizing the code running on the databases often results in another 25% of rightsizing. These are real and significant opportunities to cut costs.

“To illustrate the potential impact: Fortified Data is working with a large financial services firm and recently began providing full databases managed services for them. Our Senior DBA managing the client quickly recognized that dozens of non-production servers and databases were licensed under “Enterprise” vs “Developer” editions.

By downgrading this environment, which entails less than 2 months of work, the client’s annual licensing costs drop at least $450,000 – that’s a 19X ROI in just 5 years. As a CFO, my job would be easy if every proposal had a 19X 5-year ROI!“

With the right expertise, opportunities for significant cost savings exist within virtually every database estate. As tech budgets become further constrained in pursuit of strategic initiatives to implement AI or beef up cyber security, removing excess costs from within the tech stack allows for a reallocation to these strategies, while likely improving the performance and reliability of the environment.

Assessments to Discover Cost Savings

An assessment of the data estate is an excellent way to start understanding the untapped potential for cost savings that exists within the data estate.  Beyond a general health check, Fortified Data assessment provides a detailed view of the entire data estate and highlights areas of opportunities, risks and readiness for peak demands and growth. It highlights areas prime for optimization and rightsizing, such as licensing, tuning “server hog” code and other inefficiencies, addressing performance and stability issues, indexing enhancements and capacity planning.

These areas, if not optimized, result in over consumption of CPU, memory and disk I/O. Having such resources under pressure causes resource contention and impacts overall health, degrades efficiency and limits scalability. As transactions slow and reduction in performance impacts business, conventional wisdom calls for more resources – and the “vicious cycle” carries on.

Further analysis examines the readiness for data migration, perhaps to the cloud or return to on-prem – as we see many companies realize that there are advantages to both. Indexing, data integrity, location of databases, session blocking and deadlocking events all become critically important in operating in a cloud environment to control costs.

Additional benefits of reviewing and optimizing the data estate includes affording an opportunity to review data retention and governance policies. Implementing archiving and purging strategies for data commits the moving, or removing, older, infrequently accessed data from the active database to separate storage locations or archival systems. As databases grow, query performance can degrade, and maintenance tasks become more resource intensive. Purging older data improves query response times and streamlines backup and recovery processes, while providing capacity for growth.

Finally, security. Vulnerabilities exist within the data estate and most security assessments (and professionals) underestimate, or ignore, these potential weaknesses in otherwise robust cyber security frameworks. Fundamentally, this comes down to access. The number of admin accounts tends to grow disproportionately with what is required to manage the environment. Guest privileges often go un-checked and provide excessive privileges. Password policies become lax.

And, yes, malware may hide within the databases. A Fortified Data DBA discovered malware in a client’s system during routine patching. This was after our client was victim to a malware attack and had the entire tech stack “sanitized” by security experts who could follow the malware throughout the system but lacked the specific database expertise to understand how the malware interacted with the databases.

Today, every facet of a company’s operations depends on data and success requires uninterrupted access to that data. New technologies, ever-faster computing power and increasingly sophisticated analytics demand more and more data. It is mind boggling in terms of the potential, but also the expense and expertise required to capitalize on these tools and information.

The demands are too great and the velocity too high to assume a “learn as we go” approach. Database management systems require unique and deep expertise. Fortified Data’s consultants and DBAs have gained such expertise from working on a wide range of platforms and applications with hundreds of clients. Our experience measured in decades, not years, allowing us to optimize reliable and stable environments, and ensure that they meet the growth objectives of the company.