SENTINEL
Services we provide:
- Discovery
- Strategy
- UX/UI design
- Website development
- Kentico implementation
About Sentinel
Sentinel is one of the largest employee benefits providers in the Northeast with 4,000+ clients and more than 250,000 plan participants. Sentinel partnered with SilverTech for their website redesign to accentuate their competitive advantages to other providers and strengthen brand messaging and company culture online. Additionally, they wanted to highlight Sentinel as a one-stop-shop benefits provider for employers and employees. Sentinel sought SilverTech’s expertise to create an experience geared towards the individual including storytelling elements through iconography, lifestyle-type imagery, and testimonials on their website.
The Process
Sentinel chose SilverTech’s recommendation of Kentico for several reasons. What appealed most to them was the easy-to-use interface for content editors, the ability to tag content clearly and effectively for multiple user groups, varied ability levels/place in the sales funnel, and the platform’s marketing automation abilities. Since the main goal of this website redesign was to create lead generation, the power and customizable functionality of the Kentico CMS coupled with the easy-to-use personalization and marketing automation features was a no brainer for Sentinel.
The Challenges
SilverTech faced several challenges throughout working on this project. One of the pains of Sentinel’s old site was that the homepage was difficult to use, asking users to act before understanding who Sentinel is. The new website clearly communicates the Sentinel brand before asking users to act. Another challenge that SilverTech faced was placing educational materials and related resources in a location and manner on the website that would be the most beneficial to users. This would make it easy for users to find information on their own and eliminate the need for Sentinel to send users direct links to the information. Sentinel loves the new website and SilverTech was able to address all the challenges of the old website.
RESULTS
Azure SQL Database Outage Disrupts Services in East US
4/4/24
Between 7PM ET on 03 Apr 2024 and 12:30PM ET on 04 Apr 2024, a temporary Azure outage impacted some Azure SQL Database customers.
While the exact cause and scope of the outage are still under investigation, this disruption has caused downtime for some businesses and organizations.
What We Know From Azure
According to Azure, the Azure SQL DB services were impacted. New connections to databases in the East US may have resulted in an error or timeout. Existing connections remained available to accept new requests, however if those connections were terminated and re-established, they may also have failed.
Azure automatically failed out the US East region to mitigate the impact for any resources with a failover policy. This would include any clients on a hosting tier with disaster recovery services. Upon automatically switching back into US East, some page rendering anomalies were observed, resulting in images not displaying correctly. The SilverTech team has intervened to manually resolve any issues we have encountered or were made aware of.
- Region Impacted: Widespread, potentially impacting users across the country.
- Affected Services: Azure SQL Database.
- Current Status: Microsoft states that the issues currently have been resolved.
What Is SilverTech Doing
- Our IT team has actively monitored the situation over the last 24 hours.
- SilverTech project managers are communicating information and updates that are provided to us from Azure to impacted customers individually.
- SilverTech is intervening to resolve any image rendering issues that have resulted from Azure reinstating services in East US.
- We will review the Microsoft Azure Incident Report, when available, and provide information to impacted customers.
- As of this time, SilverTech clients are not experiencing further disruptions.
Business Continuity
In order to ensure your business is not disrupted by future unplanned individual or wide-scale outages, it is important to have a disaster recovery plan with redundancy in place. Review detailed business continuity planning recommendations made in a previous blog post, what to do when your cloud provider goes down.
SilverTech IT is available to work with your IT professionals to discuss or initiate disaster recovery plans and pricing.
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Hosting and managed services