Solution & Infrastructure Architecture
Infrastructure decisions are the most expensive ones to reverse. Choosing the wrong database, under-sizing a server, or designing a network that cannot be segmented later will quietly tax every project that follows for years. Our architecture practice produces the blueprint — sized, costed, diagrammed and stress-tested on paper — before a single rand is committed to hardware or cloud spend.
Capacity planning grounded in your numbers
We size infrastructure from your actual load profile: concurrent users, transaction volume, peak-to-average ratio, data growth rate and retention obligations. The output is a specification with named instance types, storage tiers, and a projected monthly cost — not a vague recommendation to "use the cloud".
Security and POPIA designed in
Network segmentation, private subnets, least-privilege IAM, encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, audit logging and data residency are architectural decisions. Retrofitting them after launch is expensive and usually incomplete. We design to POPIA obligations from the start, including where personal information physically lives and who can reach it.
Failure is a design input
Every architecture we produce states its recovery objectives explicitly: how much data you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to be down. From those two numbers everything else follows — replication strategy, backup frequency, failover topology and the runbook someone follows at 3am. Untested backups are not backups.
A blueprint you can build or tender
You receive network topology diagrams, server specifications, a data flow map, a security model, a costed bill of materials and a phased implementation plan. It is vendor-neutral enough to tender competitively, and specific enough that whoever wins can build from it without guessing.
What you get
- Solution architecture and technology selection
- Server sizing and capacity planning
- Network topology and segmentation design
- Cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and cost modelling
- On-premise, hybrid and colocation design
- High availability, failover and disaster recovery planning
- Security architecture and POPIA data-residency mapping
- Costed bill of materials and phased implementation roadmap
Architecture Design — common questions
A written architecture document containing network diagrams, server and storage specifications, a data flow map, the security model, recovery objectives, a costed bill of materials and a phased implementation plan. It is a standalone deliverable you own and can hand to any implementation partner.
It depends on load predictability, data residency requirements, existing capital investment and the skills your team already has. Steady, predictable workloads with strict residency obligations often cost less on-premise or in a local data centre. Spiky, growing or geographically distributed workloads usually favour cloud. We model both against your actual numbers rather than defaulting to either.
Yes. We map where personal information is stored, how it moves between systems, who can access it, how long it is retained and how it is deleted. Data residency, encryption, access control and audit logging are treated as architectural requirements. We are not attorneys and do not provide legal opinions, but the architecture is designed to support your compliance obligations.
Yes, and it is a common arrangement. Vendor-neutral architecture gives you a defensible specification to tender against, comparable quotes from multiple implementers, and a technical reference to hold the winning vendor to. We can also stay on in a review capacity during implementation.
Architecture Design across South Africa
We deliver solution & infrastructure architecture remotely to businesses nationwide. Each area page covers the sectors we work with there.
Ready to talk about architecture design?
Send us the problem in plain language. We will come back with the questions that matter, a realistic sense of scope, and an honest view on whether this is the right thing to build.