Advanced Enterprise IT Infrastructure Design Training Course

Course overview

Enterprise infrastructure teams must make design decisions that remain dependable when demand rises, sites multiply, vendors change, and security requirements tighten. Senior engineers and architects are often asked to modernise legacy estates, integrate cloud platforms, justify resilience investments, and reduce operational risk without disrupting business services. This course addresses the practical gap between knowing individual infrastructure technologies and producing a defensible end-to-end architecture that connects business requirements, service targets, network and compute design, security controls, recoverability, cost, and operational ownership.

Participants learn to design hybrid enterprise infrastructure using structured architecture methods and measurable engineering criteria. They translate business drivers into non-functional requirements, capacity models, availability targets, recovery objectives, and technical decision records. The course covers workload placement, virtualisation and container platform choices, network segmentation, identity integration, storage and backup architecture, cloud landing zones, infrastructure as code, observability, and lifecycle management. Participants use TOGAF-aligned architecture views, ArchiMate-style dependency mapping, Terraform patterns, VMware vSphere concepts, and Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework principles to evaluate design alternatives.

Delivery combines instructor-led design clinics with realistic architecture scenarios: a data-centre consolidation, a regulated hybrid-cloud migration, and a resilience remediation programme. Teams work from a business case through requirements, constraints, risk analysis, target-state design, migration waves, and governance checkpoints. Each participant leaves with an enterprise infrastructure design pack containing context and logical architecture diagrams, a requirements traceability matrix, capacity and availability assumptions, a resilience design, a risk register, decision records, and a 90-day implementation roadmap suitable for adaptation in their organisation.

The course is best suited to experienced infrastructure professionals moving into architecture ownership, and to technical leads who need to challenge supplier designs or obtain investment approval for complex infrastructure change.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Translate business services into measurable non-functional requirements, service-level objectives, RTOs and RPOs
• Create baseline and target-state infrastructure architecture views using TOGAF-aligned and ArchiMate-style modelling
• Evaluate workload placement across on-premises, private cloud and public cloud using latency, compliance, cost and resilience criteria
• Design segmented network, identity and privileged-access control patterns for hybrid enterprise environments
• Produce capacity, performance and availability models using demand assumptions and failure-domain analysis
• Develop backup, disaster-recovery and multi-site resilience designs aligned to stated recovery objectives
• Define reusable infrastructure-as-code patterns and governance controls using Terraform workflows
• Build an implementation-ready enterprise infrastructure design pack with decision records, risks, migration waves and roadmap

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Infrastructure Architects — who own target-state designs across compute, network, storage and cloud platforms
• Senior Systems Engineers — who are moving from platform implementation into cross-domain design responsibility
• Cloud Architects — who must integrate cloud landing zones with existing enterprise identity, network and operational services
• Network and Security Architects — who need to embed segmentation, access controls and resilience requirements into wider infrastructure designs
• Technical Leads and IT Managers — who must assess design options, supplier proposals and investment trade-offs
• Enterprise Architects — who need credible infrastructure viewpoints linked to business capabilities and transformation roadmaps

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have three or more years of hands-on experience in infrastructure operations, engineering or technical design. They should understand TCP/IP networking, DNS, identity and access management, virtual machines, storage, backup concepts, Windows or Linux administration, and basic cloud service models. Familiarity with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Azure or AWS, and reading architecture diagrams is useful. The course assumes participants can discuss availability, capacity and security trade-offs in a production environment. Prior TOGAF, ArchiMate, Terraform coding, formal enterprise architecture certification, or advanced programming experience is not required.

Training methodology

The instructor uses short technical briefings followed by guided architecture work against a single evolving enterprise case. Participants analyse service dependencies, model requirements, calculate capacity and availability assumptions, select workload-placement patterns, and test failure scenarios in design teams. Hands-on sessions use architecture templates, Terraform examples, vSphere and cloud reference material rather than product demonstrations alone. Peer design reviews simulate an architecture review board, requiring participants to challenge assumptions and defend trade-offs. The final session converts the case design into an implementation plan and a personal application plan for a live workplace initiative.

Course outline

Day 1: Architecture drivers and current-state assessment

• Business capability mapping and critical-service identification
• Non-functional requirements elicitation and prioritisation
• Service-level objectives, RTO and RPO definition
• Current-state infrastructure inventory and dependency mapping
• TOGAF-aligned baseline, target and transition architecture views
• ArchiMate-style application, technology and service relationship modelling
• Architecture principles, constraints and assumptions registers

Workshop: Participants create a baseline architecture, stakeholder requirement set and traceability matrix for a multi-site business service.

Day 2: Compute, cloud and platform placement decisions

• Workload classification by criticality, data sensitivity and operational profile
• Hybrid-cloud placement decision matrix
• Virtualisation clusters and VMware vSphere resource-pool design
• Container platform and virtual-machine hosting trade-offs
• Cloud landing-zone foundations for subscriptions, accounts and management groups
• Capacity forecasting using demand, growth and headroom assumptions
• Lifecycle, patching and platform-standardisation strategies

Workshop: Participants score a workload portfolio and produce a placement recommendation with capacity assumptions and platform rationale.

Day 3: Network, identity and security architecture

• Network zoning, segmentation and trust-boundary design
• IP addressing, DNS, routing and hybrid connectivity dependencies
• Identity federation, directory integration and conditional-access patterns
• Privileged-access management and administrative tiering
• Zero-trust principles applied to enterprise infrastructure
• Security logging, SIEM integration and audit evidence requirements
• Third-party connectivity and supplier access control design

Workshop: Participants design a segmented hybrid network and identity-access model, documenting trust boundaries and control ownership.

Day 4: Resilience, automation and operational design

• Failure domains across hosts, clusters, zones, sites and cloud regions
• Availability calculation and single-point-of-failure analysis
• Backup architecture, immutability and restore-validation design
• Disaster-recovery patterns for active-passive and active-active services
• Terraform state management, modules and policy-controlled deployment
• Observability design using metrics, logs, traces and service dashboards
• Operational readiness, runbooks, support models and escalation paths

Workshop: Participants produce a resilience design and Terraform governance approach for a critical service with defined RTO and RPO targets.

Day 5: Governance, migration and design assurance

• Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework review criteria
• Architecture decision records and option appraisal techniques
• Risk registers, technical debt assessment and mitigation planning
• Migration-wave planning and dependency-led sequencing
• Cost, licensing and total-cost-of-ownership considerations
• Architecture review board evidence and design assurance checkpoints
• Target operating model, ownership and KPI definition

Workshop: Participants complete and present an enterprise infrastructure design pack, receiving peer review and producing a 90-day implementation roadmap.

Tools & standards covered

TOGAF Standard, ArchiMate, Terraform, VMware vSphere

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions