Platform & reliability
This page explains, in plain terms, where MySentinel runs and why you can rely on it. It is written for the IT or technical advisor who wants to understand the platform without wading through internals.
It runs on Cloudflare’s global edge
MySentinel runs entirely on Cloudflare — the same global network that fronts a large share of the world’s web traffic. There are no servers for your school to run, no second cloud to operate, and no local infrastructure for a pilot to maintain. Compute runs close to the school, so the gate feels instant, and the platform inherits Cloudflare’s scale, uptime, and edge security by default.
The dashboard and portal are real-time
The admin dashboard and the parent portal update live — a check-in at the gate moves the count on the dashboard and the status in a parent’s portal without anyone refreshing. If the live connection ever drops, the screens fall back to auto-refreshing on their own, so you are never left looking at stale safety information. A small “Live” indicator confirms the stream is active.
Scanning survives a flaky signal
The gate is the most important moment, and it must never stall on the network. A scan is confirmed at the school the instant the officer records it; the guardian notification and the rest of the bookkeeping happen behind the scenes. When the signal drops, scans are held safely on the officer’s device — shown clearly in amber as “queued” — and send themselves automatically the moment connectivity returns, without creating duplicates. The officer keeps working; nothing is lost.
Every school is isolated
Each school’s data is kept separate from every other school’s. The school a request belongs to is taken from the user’s verified login, never from anything a browser can set, so one school’s staff can never reach another’s data. That isolation is enforced consistently across the platform, not left to any one screen to get right.
Built as independent capabilities
Rather than one giant application on one giant database, MySentinel is built as a set of independent capabilities — the gate, the roster, notifications, onboarding, and so on — each owning its own data. No capability reaches directly into another’s database; they talk through defined, typed interfaces. The benefit for you is a smaller blast radius: a fault or a change in one area is contained, and there is no single shared database for a bug or a breach to traverse.
Durable, backed-up, and recoverable
- Encrypted at rest. Data is encrypted at rest on the platform by default, with an extra layer of per-school encryption over the most sensitive personal information (see Trust & POPIA).
- Durable long-running jobs. Multi-step work — onboarding a campus, running an erasure, generating a report — runs durably: it survives interruptions, resumes where it left off, and retries individual steps rather than half-finishing.
- Retention with a cold archive. Data past its retention window is archived to cold storage before it is deleted, so records are recoverable within policy and purges are auditable.
Honest about the roadmap
The platform is built to grow with a school group. A group-owner view — a single login scoped to only your campuses — is on the roadmap; today, group-wide oversight runs through the MySentinel team, while each campus runs fully and independently. We would rather you knew that before you signed than after.