What is a Subscription Partner in Managed Services?

A new operations project or role just dropped and you have no clear picture of requirements, timeline, resources and more. Need some breathing room? Maybe you have the staff and requirements but you want to off load daily RTB work and focus on adding features. Advantis Data Services is a subscription partner for managed services. Read more for information on how this works and see if offloading lower level or daily “run the business” tasks for a flat monthly fee that is right for you.

By: Gus Segura — March 2021

Simply, Advantis will implement a standard contract for a flat monthly fee that includes a fixed number of services that will be performed. This will typically include some type of monitoring, incident management for fixed number of occurrences and a contracted response time for the incidence. A simple example is best.

Example: You have three RDS instances running in AWS in one zone. One is Dev, another is QA and the third is Prod. QA and Prod are fairy stable. Dev requires full time staff to work with the dev teams to keep up to date. This creates a resource bottleneck and prevents you from performing routine daily maintenance on QA and Prod. You need a solution that will let you focus on dev support.

So, you contract with Advantis to managed the QA and Prod for 24/7 monitoring (mostly size and resource), L1/L2 support triage, vendor — system patch consistency and basic user admin (creating users, granting initial access, etc. — nothing really in the DBA realm: your user creation is based on a well defined process and run-book.) You know from experience that you may have to adjust size or tweak a memory setting once or twice a month. You also know that you would be asked to create 2–5 new users per month. Things run smoothly for the most part and if there is an issues you want to be alerted so that your staff can address more severe issues.

Its a good partnership that allows you to reduce full-time staff on your team while maintaining the same level of support for your users. The partnership is in its 16th month and you’ve reduced your incidence rate by 25% and your MTTR (mean time to resolution) by 50% because your on-call / pager duty schedule is now augmented by additional automated 24/7 monitoring and external support team at Advantis Data Services. Job well done!

Summary of Benefits

• Flexible Pricing and Custom Solution Contracts
• All contacts include some level of Automated 24/7 monitoring
• Primary contact is a technical resource — not a middle manager or PM
• Low startup cost — you pay 1st and last months subscription to start
• Work items are well defined, based on runbooks and standard contracts
• No upfront training costs
• Fast Implementation

Advantis Data Service is part of Advantis Global and Advantis Medical. There are standard work items that ops teams do every month to keep systems up and running…More on this next month.