IT staff suffering from burnout? Here's how a specialized managed service provider can help

As businesses across industries continue to grapple with staffing shortages due to the ongoing "Great Resignation," many IT workers feel the stress of additional hours and increasing workloads. Put simply, IT workers are suffering from burnout, and businesses are buckling under the weight of unfinished projects and are unable to keep up with the essential maintenance of their database environments.

Recent trends -- such as the rise in resignations, the skyrocketing demand for IT services, the rapid acceleration of digital transformation, and the growing need for new initiatives surrounding data security -- further complicate this situation. To say that IT departments have been overworked would be the understatement of the century.

So how can businesses reconcile the need to support their system environments 24/7 with the need to retain IT talent? Asking staff to muscle through 80-hour workweeks will only accelerate burnout. At the same time, providing workers with much-needed time off may exacerbate problems like backlogs and periods of system database vulnerability. On the surface, it seems like a lose-lose situation for virtually everyone involved.

But what if you could find additional support to meet your IT needs while also alleviating burnout and boosting the job satisfaction of your existing employees? Such a solution exists, and it involves integrating specialized managed service providers (MSPs) into your IT and database maintenance operations.

Complementing Your Team with Specialized MSPs

When IT workers such as database administrators (DBAs) feel overworked, it can compromise performance, creating periods when businesses can't realize the full breadth of their skill set. This situation can delay critical initiatives like application development or result in insufficient database monitoring. These speedbumps are not ideal or sustainable in today's fast-paced digital environment.

However, you can quickly fill those talent gaps by bringing in an MSP. Rather than replacing workers, MSPs generate additional horsepower, helping your existing staff catch up on backlogged projects and achieve their established goals of maintaining or upgrading cloud services, security, analytics, data management, customized applications, and application modernization.

In a sense, MSPs are a secret weapon. Their superpower is in their unique diversity and agility. MSPs often come with a full-service, highly skilled team, such as DBAs and other tech professionals, with decades of experience and specialized knowledge. So you're not just supporting the talent you already employ but also gaining additional capabilities and benefits in the process.

Some specialized MSPs utilize a combination of intellectual property and automation, with veteran teams to support their IT environments. They enable businesses to meet virtually any challenge, even if their existing staff doesn't have the skills needed to address an issue. MSPs can assist with analytics, data management, application development and modernization, cloud migration, and more.

Again, this is all about performing the essential tasks necessary to keep your business operational, such as monitoring your database for performance and security. Moreover, a genuinely optimal MSP will have many security certifications, allowing companies to rest easy knowing their systems are in good hands.

How to Know When an MSP Might Be Needed

When evaluating if an MSP might be necessary, the first step is recognizing your existing staff's challenges. Are your IT staffers showing signs of burnout or expressing feelings of being overworked? Are they drowning in a rapidly compounding backlog of unfinished work? Are they suddenly resigning?

If this is true for your organization, it could be time to integrate outside resources. MSPs can perform fractional services, providing something akin to "half a DBA." In this instance, an MSP can take over monitoring or maintenance duties for 20 hours a week.

But the need for an MSP doesn't always have to be the result of burnout. Maybe you have a significant initiative that is critical to your customer base. For example, you may need to move data into the cloud, but your staff isn't necessarily well-versed in database migrations or data integration. Configuring and executing a successful move to the cloud is an incredibly complex and challenging endeavor. So, why not bring on an MSP with the knowledge and experience to do the job?

Or maybe you're drowning in IT and growing on-site costs but can't figure out what you should do to stop the bleeding. An MSP could offer a fresh perspective of an enterprise's overall operations and specific needs.

"Doing More with Less"

When you bring in an MSP, you boost employee satisfaction, free up their evenings and weekends, and alleviate burnout. You're also gaining access to a service-delivery team with bountiful experience and specialized knowledge to meet your business needs. Whether it's additional database monitoring, expediting a time-sensitive project, or expanding your overall capabilities, an MSP can help you achieve your goals without the need to enter the competitive hiring sphere or compromise the well-being of your staff.

Many aspire to "do more with less" while often failing to put this aspiration into practice. MSPs can deliver services that help you achieve your business goals and bolster ongoing the success and integrity of your IT operations when and where it's needed most.

Image Credit: Brian A Jackson / Shutterstock

Eric Russo is senior vice president of database services at Datavail. Eric has 25 years of experience working in the technology industry. His specialties include database administration, web development, programming, scripting, and more.