Your DBA resigned on Friday. Friendly enough, two weeks’ notice, a handover document nobody will read. By the end of the month the person who actually understood your databases is gone, and so is most of what they knew.
That is the risk nobody puts on a register, because it does not look like a risk until the day it bites. The backups, the failover, the one server that has to be patched in a particular order at a particular time, the workaround for the report that breaks every quarter end. None of that lived in a system. It lived in a head, and the head has left the building.
Here is the uncomfortable question. If your senior database person vanished tomorrow, no notice, no handover, how long before something quietly broke that nobody knew how to fix? For most organisations the honest answer is measured in days, not months.
This is the oldest risk in our trade and the least respected. A database estate held together by one capable person is a single point of failure that does not show up on any architecture diagram. It is not a server you can cluster. It is a person, and people leave.
How would you prove to your board, today, that your databases are documented, monitored, and recoverable by someone other than the person who built them? If the honest answer is “we’d manage”, that is the gap, and it is wider than it looks.
We run a free, read-only health check that captures what your databases actually need, in writing, in plain English. The point is simple: the knowledge should not be able to walk out the door. The server has been telling you the whole time. We just write it down where everyone can see it.
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.
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