Jeff Garbus, 30-year IT veteran and author of over a dozen books on database technologies, has been a database consultant for most of his career. He recently had dinner with a CTO-friend who has brought Jeff with him to multiple companies, and was asked, “If you were going to a conference to hear Jeff speak, what would you like to hear him talking about?”
He spent almost a half hour answering the question, providing a rich list of topics for a database expert to talk to CTO and CIO level people, with a focus on the business end rather than the technical.
List of Topics for a Data Expert
New requirements are coming in from HIPAA, SOC, and SarBox:
1. Saving a small fortune on encryption.
Which can be at the database, table, column, or DISK level.
2. Automating data masking.
3. Disaster recovery options are changing.
Do you buy a tool, or use new vendor features, or a combo? VMWare vs. clustering vs. (for example) Always On vs. Veem vs. Zerto vs.?
4. Ransomware, are you prepared for when it happens?
5. Is your staff at the technical level they think?
Do they have the expertise you need? Are they protecting their turf, or asking for help when they need it? Do they know they need help?
6. How do you tech out your tech staff?
Are you finding the right candidates? Do they have the skills they claim? Can you even find expertise in your target technologies?
7. SAN economics have changed.
Today, you can get a petabyte of flash storage for approximately the cost you were paying for maintenance of your current SAN. Should you? What is the world doing?
8. Performance and tuning approaches and application performance requirements are changing.
Don’t accept that that’s the way out always worked. New techniques for accelerating performance, monitoring, hardware, replicate.
9. High fidelity DB.
Do you know for sure that your database is not corrupt? What about your backups? Is your data being adequately maintained?
10. Depth and breadth of your staff.
11. DBA as single point of failure.
Author Jeffrey Garbus
