You're not the only one stuck here. Most teams consider one of four options, here's what each actually costs, plus the one more organizations are moving towards.
Deep expertise focused entirely on your systems, someone fully accountable for just this.
A senior SQL Server DBA is hard to find and expensive to keep. Even once hired, you've solved nothing structurally, the knowledge still lives in one person. If they leave, you're back where you started.
You have the budget for a full-time hire and enough SQL Server work to justify it long-term.
Whether it's ongoing support or help when something breaks, a good consultant can genuinely keep your environment healthy.
The knowledge still lives outside your team, with the consultant or their firm, not with you.
But there's another problem: consistency. Different consultants solve the same problem in different ways. Put ten DBAs in a room with the same challenge and you may get ten different solutions.
Over time, different parts of your SQL Server environment are built, configured and maintained differently. That creates complexity, makes the environment harder to govern, and increases both operational risk and cost.
When the consultant leaves, you're not only losing knowledge. You're left managing the variation they created.
You only need occasional, isolated help, and can tolerate some inconsistency in how it's handled.
Your team is freed up entirely, not just from SQL Server, from thinking about it at all.
You hand over control entirely. You depend on someone else's availability, pricing, and priorities, exactly the dependency you were trying to remove.
You have no interest in keeping any of this in-house, ever.
Zero cost, zero effort, today.
Nothing, until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, you rarely get advance warning. A backup fails silently for months before anyone notices. A database runs out of space in the middle of a workday. By the time you find out, it's already an incident, not a warning.
You have no business-critical databases, could tolerate days of downtime without real consequences, and could accept losing that data permanently if it ever came to that.
Built for the 9 out of 10 the industry forgot
Any technician on your team can manage SQL Server with confidence, and everyone from the technician to the CEO can see exactly how the environment is doing.
A predictable subscription, not a new hire's salary, a consultant's invoice, or a guess about what happens if someone leaves. You know exactly what you're paying for, and it doesn't change when your team does.
You're still the one responsible for your SQL Server. DB24 removes the need for specialist expertise, it doesn't remove the responsibility itself.
You want your own team in control, without needing a DBA to make that possible.