Architecture design and review
Design environments around real requirements — expected load, acceptable downtime, recovery objectives, compliance constraints — and review existing ones against the same standard rather than against fashion.
Cloud Solutions
Cloud infrastructure that stays reliable as your business grows
Ufanzo designs and migrates cloud environments built for the load you actually have — with the reliability, security and cost characteristics the business needs, and no accidental complexity.
Why it matters
The problem before the solution.
Cloud infrastructure tends to arrive by accumulation. A server here, a managed database there, a few things configured by hand during an outage and never written down. It works until it needs to scale, survive a failure, pass a security review, or be understood by someone who was not there when it was built. Ufanzo brings deliberate architecture to that environment: designing for the reliability the business actually requires, migrating in stages that can be reversed, and making infrastructure reproducible rather than hand-tended.
Problems addressed
Signs this is the work you need.
If several of these describe your situation, there is usually a structural cause worth addressing rather than a series of coincidences.
- Infrastructure configured by hand and impossible to rebuild reliably
- No clear picture of what would happen if a key component failed
- Scaling that requires manual intervention every time load increases
- Deployments that are risky enough that releases get postponed
- Security settings nobody has reviewed since the environment was created
- Cloud spend growing faster than the business it supports
What Ufanzo does
Cloud Solutions, in practice.
Cloud migration
Move workloads in stages, each independently verifiable and reversible, with a tested rollback at every step. Big-bang migrations fail in ways that are expensive to unwind.
Infrastructure as code
Define infrastructure in version-controlled configuration so environments are reproducible, changes are reviewed before they are applied, and drift between staging and production is visible.
Reliability and resilience
Build in health checks, automated recovery, backups that are actually restore-tested, and a documented answer to what happens when a dependency fails.
Security practice
Least-privilege access, credentials in a secret store rather than in configuration files, encryption in transit and at rest, network boundaries, and audit logging that would support an investigation.
Operations and modernisation
Monitoring and alerting that distinguishes a real incident from noise, and incremental modernisation of components where the current design is the thing holding the business back.
What is inside
The disciplines this covers.
Cloud Solutions is not one activity. These are the sub-practices it breaks into, and an engagement usually draws on several rather than all of them.
Landing zone and account structure
The organisational boundary the environment sits inside - AWS accounts, Azure subscriptions or Google Cloud projects - separating production from everything else. This boundary is what later makes cost attributable and blast radius containable, and it is painful to impose after the fact.
Networking and connectivity
Private and public segmentation, routing, DNS, and connectivity back to offices or other clouds. Most security findings trace back to a network boundary that was never drawn.
Compute and container platform
Choosing between managed services, containers and serverless on the basis of operational burden rather than fashion, then building the deployment path that puts code there repeatably.
Data stores and managed services
Selecting and configuring databases, caches, object storage and queues: sizing, backup, encryption, failover behaviour, and what actually happens when the primary becomes unavailable.
Identity and access
Least-privilege roles for humans and workloads, credentials held in a secret store rather than configuration files, and audit logging that would support an investigation instead of merely existing.
Reliability and recovery
Health checks, automated recovery, defined recovery objectives, and backups that are restore-tested on a schedule. An untested backup is a hypothesis, not a safeguard.
Infrastructure as code and delivery
Environments defined in version-controlled configuration so they can be rebuilt, reviewed and safely changed, with drift between staging and production visible rather than discovered.
Business benefits
What changes for the business.
Stated as directions rather than figures. The size of the change depends on your starting point, and anyone quoting a percentage before looking at your environment is quoting a sales number.
- Infrastructure that can be rebuilt from source rather than from memory
- Capacity that follows demand instead of requiring manual intervention
- A tested answer to how the system recovers from failure
- Deployments routine enough that releases are not postponed
- Access and credentials managed deliberately
- Cost characteristics understood before they become a surprise
Where it fits
Typical engagements.
Migrating off ageing infrastructure
Workloads running on hardware or hosting that is out of support are moved to managed cloud services in verifiable stages, without a single high-risk cutover weekend.
Preparing for growth
An environment that works at current volume is redesigned to handle a step change in load without a rewrite when the growth arrives.
Architecture review
An independent assessment of an existing environment against reliability, security and cost criteria, with findings prioritised by risk and effort.
Making infrastructure reproducible
A hand-configured environment is captured as infrastructure as code so it can be rebuilt, reviewed and safely changed.
How it works
How cloud environments are designed
For readers evaluating whether this is done properly.
Design starts from stated requirements rather than from a reference diagram: how much downtime is genuinely acceptable, how much data loss a recovery may involve, what the realistic peak load is, and which regulatory constraints apply. Those answers determine whether the right design is a single well-configured managed service or something considerably more involved. Most businesses are better served by the former than by a distributed architecture they cannot operate.
Everything that defines an environment lives in version control. Changes are proposed, reviewed and applied through the same process as application code, which makes them auditable and reversible. Managed services are preferred over self-operated equivalents unless there is a specific reason to take on the operational burden, because undifferentiated infrastructure work is rarely where a business should spend its engineering time.
Reliability is verified rather than assumed. Backups are restored on a schedule, because an untested backup is a hypothesis. Failure modes are exercised deliberately so that recovery behaviour is known before an incident rather than discovered during one. Monitoring is built around symptoms the business cares about — requests failing, queues growing, jobs not completing — rather than around resource graphs that do not map to user impact.
Related work
What this connects to.
These areas overlap in practice, and work in one often depends on work in another.
Architecture and cost are the same conversation held twice: most of what a FinOps engagement finds was decided here, in an instance size or a storage class chosen years earlier. Cloud work also sets the ground for software development, since the deployment and data layer shape what the application can assume.
FinOps
Cloud cost visibility, allocation, unit economics and optimization, run as an ongoing practice rather than a one-off cleanup.
Read moreSoftware Development
Custom web applications, internal tools and integrations built to be maintainable, tested and genuinely fit for the process.
Read moreTechnology Consulting
Architecture and modernisation assessments, technology strategy, vendor evaluation and implementation planning you can act on.
Read more
Let's talk
Would your infrastructure survive losing a component?
If the answer is uncertain, that is worth knowing before it is tested for you. Tell us what you are running and we will review how it holds up.