The five things we find on almost every SQL Server

Across 20,000+ assessments, the same five gaps turn up on almost every estate. None are exotic. All are preventable. Most owners have no idea they are there. Here they are, so you can check yours before they find you.

1. Backups that are taken, and never restore-tested. This is the single most common critical gap we find. A backup nobody has restored is a folder, not a safety net. The job runs green every night and proves nothing, because the only test that counts is a restore, and almost nobody runs one.
2. Servers paying for licensing they do not use. Over-provisioning is money lit on fire every month. Cores were thrown at a database years ago to chase a little speed, every core carries a SQL Server licence, and nobody revisited it. Most estates run Enterprise on workloads that never touch an Enterprise feature.
3. Access nobody has counted. Sysadmin sprawl, an exposed sa account, logins from people who left years ago that still work. This is the first thing an auditor flags and the first door an attacker tries.
4. Patches missing, or versions past support. Unsupported SQL Server still in production, carrying known, fixable vulnerabilities that will never be patched because the version stopped getting fixes.
5. A DR plan nobody has timed. “We have backups” is not “we can be trading again by Monday.” Almost nobody has actually timed a restore of their most important system, or confirmed the recovery copy sits somewhere a single failure cannot take with it.

The uncomfortable part: the licensing leak is the easy money. Over-provisioning is visible in an afternoon. The risks you cannot see, the backup that will not restore, the audit you would fail today, are the ones that end careers. The five above are not rare. They are the normal state of an estate nobody has checked.

Where does yours sit?

A free, read-only 15-minute SQL Server health check gives you a graded report on one of your instances, in plain English. No install. Nothing to buy. No obligation. You get the number whether or not we ever work together.

The proof: 20,000+ SQL Server assessments. NZ$50M+ in client licensing eliminated, about $7M a year. Worst single licensing leak seen around 95%. 17 compliance frameworks. New Zealand based, established 2018. SQL Server is all we do.