The world of work has changed dramatically over the last year and, at Redgate, we’ve been reflecting on what this might mean for our business, and the ways that we work together in the future. From 2022 onwards, we’re aiming to offer Redgate staff a flexible-hybrid working model across our global organization.

In the IT team at Redox, I wear two hats: Software Development Manager and DBA. I’m the only DBA in the team, so if anything goes wrong it’s my job to identify and fix it. As you might imagine, this can be challenging when being a DBA isn’t your full-time role. Based in Sydney, Redox is one of the leading chemical and ingredients distributors in the world, with over 350 employees across our locations in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the US.

These are interesting – and challenging – times to be a Managed Service Provider. When it first published its Managed Services Market Size Forecast, Mordor Intelligence valued the market at US$152 billion in 2020, and predicted it to reach US$274 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 11.2%. Over a year later, following a pandemic which has changed the way most of us work and which will probably see permanent changes going forward, Mordor is sticking by its prediction.

How do we help Database Administrators (DBAs) embrace DevOps in a way that can be really productive and part of a rich DevOps team that delivers value to customers quickly and continuously? That’s an important question to ask right now because there’s a common view among DBAs that DevOps isn’t for them. They’re responsible for documentation and maintenance and deployments, they have internal customers, and they serve internal requests.

Flyway is an open-source database deployment tool that also includes a paid tier called Teams. Since it’s open-source, you can just download Flyway and run it for free. You’ll get a robust DevOps tool to assist you in deploying your databases just like you deploy your code. It just works. So, why would you even bother to pay for Teams? Actually, there are a number of reasons why people pay for advanced tiers of open-source software in general.

In the latest DBAle podcast episode our hosts, Chris and Chris, tackled what they really mean by cataloging a database and how taking a ‘giraffe’s eye view’ approach to compliance is not enough. That’s because the most common data concerns for managers and execs center around where your sensitive data is, the risk it poses and, if you’re migrating to the cloud, how much sensitive data is being stored on that database or that instance.

It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them.

For many businesses, using a Managed Services Provider (MSP) makes sense, particularly when it comes to database management, monitoring and security. They can control costs while still having access to expert resources, and dial up or down the service as required. It’s perhaps no surprise then that 47% of people surveyed in the Channel Futures 2020 MSP 501 Report identified professional services as a growth area, 51% identified enhanced network monitoring, and 85% identified security services.

This question comes up all the time: How do you migrate between monitoring systems? The answer is both simple and complicated. In order to understand this better, rather than just rely on my own knowledge, I reached out to a number of people to see how they accomplished this. I’m going to summarize their process for you here in order to help others who may find themselves in need of this information.