The Challenge
Insurance Administrative Services (IAS) is a local company based out of Clearwater, FL. They provide innovative business solutions for insurance agencies and facilitate business processes for some of the country’s leading agencies. In 2010, the company recognized the daily management of the database and backups was impacting the productivity of their team. The company’s Microsoft SQL Server required management for upgrading, tuning, and scaling that took valuable time away from their core team. They decided that in order to optimize their potential they needed a dedicated IT team. However, to hire an in-house team would have been costly and time consuming. The required staffing, personnel, and HR resources that would be needed encouraged them to seek a different solution.
The Approach
The organization set about researching its alternatives. It determined that a remote DBA and database managed service provider could not only deliver the services they needed, it could potentially save them much of the cost and frustration related to hiring in-house. Additionally, MSP’s also perform one-off valuable services like emergency assistance, “lift and shift” to the cloud, security assessments, and even database migrations.
The Solution
The solution for IAS was a contracted database administrator. This would give them the benefit of expert knowledge and increased resources, without the prohibitive staffing challenges. IAS selected Spinnaker Support to fill this role. Spinnaker’s managed services product provided ongoing database management and consultation to give IAS exactly what they needed. The initial partnership began as simple task: to monitor the database and backups. What grew out of this was a true partnership. After a corporate strategy realignment, Spinnaker was brought on to cover more and more tasks as needed.
The Results
Over the years the managed services contract has grown into a unique partnership between IAS and Spinnaker Support. IAS has adopted Spinnaker’s team as part of their own. Spinnaker now handles “anything that has to do with databases” for the firm. They maintain a flexible contract that allows for shifting priorities. The team at IAS is able to focus on their client work and can rely on Spinnaker to take care of their SQL Server. That’s one big headache off their plates.