National Child and Family Services Provider
Case Study
Overview
Industry: Public Service
Services: Managed Services
A leading national provider of child and family support services plays a critical role in delivering early childhood health and wellbeing programmes across the country.
The organisation relies heavily on the performance of its digital systems to support a distributed workforce of nurses, support staff, and volunteers who work directly with families.
Here’s a snapshot of the customer’s journey
The Challenge
The organisation was experiencing severe system performance issues.
Staff faced slow logins, delayed data loading, and frequent timeouts that affected their ability to use their core platform. The root causes of these issues were unclear, making them difficult to resolve.
Many systems were running on underpowered or misconfigured SQL Server environments. These configurations led to regular failures in application gateways and caused backups to interfere with overnight processing.
Further investigation revealed widespread performance issues including index fragmentation, memory bottlenecks, and inefficient SQL execution plans. The organisation needed expert help to stabilise performance and rebuild confidence in its core systems.
The Solution
DataSentinel was initially engaged to address urgent performance issues.
After deploying advanced monitoring tools and working closely with internal staff, the team identified the key causes of SQL timeouts and instability.
They refactored indexing strategies, adjusted memory settings, and optimised execution plans – implementing targeted fixes such as an index hint that reduced login time from over 30 seconds to under 500ms.
Following the success of this engagement, the relationship expanded to include a broader SQL Server estate review and managed services covering the core platform and related workloads.
DataSentinel also revived a stalled data migration project to Azure: what had been expected to take 27 weeks was completed in just three, thanks to improvements in the ETL process and data-matching logic.
Key Benefits
Core system login and performance improved dramatically
Index and query tuning eliminated long-standing timeouts
Azure data migration accelerated from months to weeks
Significant increase in visibility and control over SQL estate
Trusted, proactive partnership supporting internal IT capability
The Results
With a combination of best-practice indexing, memory tuning, and expert configuration, the core platform is now significantly more reliable and responsive.
Data migration and integration tasks have become faster and more efficient, enabling better use of cloud services. DataSentinel remains a trusted partner, providing expert support, technical insight, and responsive service that help maintain platform health and enable innovation across the organisation.
“DataSentinel turned things around fast. Their insight, responsiveness, and deep technical knowledge made a huge difference to the stability and performance of our systems.”