You pay someone to manage your databases, or your servers, or your IT. The invoice says managed. The question worth asking, calmly, is: managed how, exactly, and how would you know?
Managed is one of those words that quietly means different things to different people. To some providers it means we will fix it when you tell us it is broken. To others it means we watch it, patch it, test the backups, and tell you about problems before you have them. Both get called managed. Only one of them is actually managing the risk. The difference does not show up on the invoice. It shows up on the bad day.
If you are the person who would carry the blame when a database fails, this is worth pinning down, in plain terms, before that day. A simple set of questions does it. When was the last time our backups were actually restore-tested, not just run? What version are we on, and is it still supported? Who is watching for trouble, and how would we hear about it first? If the answers are vague, the management is vague.
You are not being difficult by asking. You are doing the part of your job that only becomes visible when it was skipped.
We run a free, read-only check that answers exactly those questions, independently, in plain English, so you can see what is genuinely being managed and what is only being invoiced. Sometimes the most useful thing we hand over is a clear picture of the gap between the two.
Want to know if this is sitting in your estate? We run a read-only check and hand you a graded report in plain English.
Get your free health check