Sentinel Adopts Service to Improve Data Delivery and Protection

Sentinel Benefits & Financial Group, a provider of employee benefit consulting, administration and brokerage services that include retirement plan and flexible spending account (FSA) administration, COBRA, insurance brokerage and investment advisory services, has adopted has adopted Actifio’s data-as-a-service platform to provide customers with access to relevant data when and where needed with ease.

Because Sentinel provides so many services that are dependent on data availability, the company says it needed to stay innovative about how it operates—whether end users want to check 401(k) balances on laptops, dial into a call center to talk about short-term investments or use a mobile device to get an answer to a question about insurance coverage. In addition, the company needed a solution to improve its disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity position beyond what was possible with tape backup.

With Actifio Sky and Actifio Data-as-a-Service, Sentinel Benefits was able to create high-availability customer data solutions. For less than the cost of a backup product, Sentinel got data copy virtualization, data production with rapid recovery, instant ability to test applications and off-site DR. Since deploying Actifio, the company has significantly reduced the administrative time of its team and slashed recovery time.

Todd Larson, CIO of Sentinel Benefits, says, “The company needed data protection improvements that checked some important boxes: deduplication, compression, efficient replication and rapid restore. However, we needed more than just backup. We wanted to get to data on demand, while enabling our test/dev processes. That’s what led us to Actifio. They worked hard to understand what we wanted and why it was important for our business.”

For more information about Actifio, visit www.actifio.com. For more information about Sentinel Benefits, visit www.sbgi.com.