Managed service plans
We run your environment, with 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, and proactive improvement.
A development server on the wrong license, for $35,000 a year
Nobody had audited what the development instance was licensed as. It was running Enterprise Edition, which is not the license a non-production server needs, and it had been billing for it.
Recurring annual saving
$35,000
A development instance moved from SQL Server Enterprise Edition to Developer Edition, the appropriate license for non-production use.
- Edition corrected
- Enterprise to Developer
- Recurs
- Every year
- Coverage on race weekends
- 24/7
In short
What happened
An elite professional motorsports organization runs race operations, engineering data and business systems on a multi-environment SQL Server estate, with no tolerance for downtime during race weekends. A Fortified Data audit found a development instance licensed as Enterprise Edition rather than Developer Edition, the appropriate license for non-production use, and correcting it removed $35,000 a year of recurring cost. The same review identified a high-risk high availability configuration, analyzed what an outage during race operations would cost, and put an interim workaround in place while the permanent fix was planned.
Why a configuration audit is worth more here than elsewhere
This organization competes at the highest level of the sport, where every millisecond counts and downtime directly affects race performance and revenue. Its IT estate carries race operations, engineering data and the business systems around them, across production, development and test. Operating margins are tight, so cost efficiency matters across the whole of it, and race weekends carry zero tolerance for downtime. Those two pressures point in opposite directions unless somebody is looking at the configuration rather than at the bill.
The gap was in-house database expertise to find configuration vulnerabilities before they caused problems. A misconfigured license and a high-risk availability design both sit quietly until someone with the right expertise goes looking, and the second one only announces itself at the worst moment.
Budget pressure to reduce IT costs was real and could not come at the expense of performance or reliability, which rules out the usual approach of removing something and seeing what breaks.
What the managed service did
Three workstreams, running alongside each other
A cost finding, a risk finding, and the monitoring that makes both of them repeatable. They ran under one managed service rather than in sequence.
Strategic cost optimization
A SQL Server licensing misconfiguration was identified on a development instance running Enterprise Edition and corrected to Developer Edition, the appropriate license for non-production use. It removed $35,000 a year of recurring cost, and clear documentation and licensing governance recommendations went with it so the same thing cannot recur unnoticed.
Proactive risk mitigation
A high-risk high availability configuration was identified, the potential revenue impact of downtime during race operations and other critical periods was analyzed, and actionable recommendations with clear implementation steps were provided. An interim workaround reduced the immediate risk while the permanent solution was planned.
Ongoing monitoring and support
Proactive monitoring catches similar configuration issues before they reach operations, regular system health assessments surface further optimization opportunities, and 24/7 coverage means expert help is available during race weekends and critical events rather than on the next business day.
What changed
- $35,000 a year off the licensing billRecurring, and with governance recommendations alongside it so an instance cannot quietly end up on the wrong edition again.
- A high-availability risk found and reducedIdentified through configuration analysis rather than through an incident, and mitigated by an interim workaround while the permanent fix was planned.
- Monitoring that catches the class of problem, not the instanceProactive monitoring established for similar configuration issues, which is the difference between finding this one and finding the next one.
- A clear return on the arrangement itselfCost avoidance and risk reduction, both of which came from looking rather than from a project anybody had scoped.
Three ways to work with us
On-Call DBA
A guaranteed 15-minute emergency response plus monthly on-demand hours that bank when unused.
Database consulting and projects
Project-based engagements for migrations, performance tuning, data modernization, business intelligence, and high availability and disaster recovery.
Do you know what your non-production servers are licensed as?
It is a five-minute question with a recurring answer, and it is the sort of thing nobody owns until somebody is watching the estate continuously. The high-availability finding on the same engagement came from the same look.
Let us show you what's possible.