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PKM Consulting Services

Strategic and Generic ManagementPKM437

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Architecture

In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, organisations face increasing threats that can disrupt operations, damage reputation, and result in severe financial and regulatory consequences. These disruptions may arise from cyber-attacks, ransomware incidents, system failures, power outages, data breaches, pandemics, civil unrest, natural disasters, cloud misconfigurations, or supply chain breakdowns.

Overview

African public sector institutions run mission-critical services that citizens and the economy depend on—ports and logistics, justice systems, revenue collection, municipal billing, identity services, and national e-government platforms. When these services go down (due to ransomware, power instability, infrastructure failure, human error, or vendor outages), the impact is immediate: queues, delayed payments, halted trade, loss of trust, and regulatory exposure.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) is no longer an optional IT function: it is a strategic governance imperative.

This programme provides a comprehensive, architecture-driven approach to building resilient organisations capable of anticipating, withstanding, responding to, and recovering from disruptions. The focus extends beyond traditional backup strategies to include enterprise-wide resilience frameworks aligned to global standards such as:

  • ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management Systems)
  • ISO 27001 (Information Security Management)
  • NIST Cybersecurity Framework
  • COBIT Governance Framework
  • ITIL Service Continuity Management The programme emphasises the integration of Business Continuity Management (BCM) with enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, risk management, and corporate governance.

Programme objectives

By the end of the programme, participants should be able to:

  1. 01Understand the strategic importance of Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
  2. 02Conduct Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Risk Assessments
  3. 03Design resilient IT and enterprise architecture frameworks
  4. 04Define RTO, RPO, MTTR and recovery strategies
  5. 05Develop and document Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP)
  6. 06Align BC/DR architecture with governance and regulatory requirements
  7. 07Design testing, simulation and crisis response exercises
  8. 08Integrate cybersecurity and cloud resilience strategies

Who should attend

  • Executives and Senior Leaders
  • Board Members and Executive Committees
  • Consultants and Strategy Analysts
  • IT Managers & Infrastructure Leads
  • Enterprise Architects
  • Risk & Compliance Managers
  • Information Security Officers
  • Business Process Owners
  • Public Sector ICT Directors
  • Internal Auditors
  • Project Managers (PMBOK / PRINCE2 environments)

Programme outline

9 modules · 32 topics

  1. 01BCM foundations and critical service analysis: Resilience strategy for the public sector3 topics
    • What “continuity” means for citizen services and national infrastructure
    • BCM vs DR vs High Availability vs Cyber Incident Response
    • Service tiers and “crown jewels” identification
  2. 02Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and dependency mapping3 topics · includes a case scenario
    • Critical business services, processes, applications, data, people, sites
    • Service dependency mapping (upstream/downstream systems; third parties)
    • Setting RTO/RPO that match reality (budget, skills, infrastructure)

    Case scenario

    Case Study Lab (Africa): Kenya national blackout and critical infrastructure • Analyse the impact of a large-scale outage on airport operations, hospitals, and government operations; design continuity for “power + network + data centre” dependencies.

  3. 03Disaster Recovery architecture and recovery strategies: DR reference architectures4 topics
    • On-prem DR: secondary site models (cold/warm/hot)
    • Active-active vs active-passive patterns
    • Storage replication, database replication, backup strategies (3-2-1, immutable)
    • DR for identity systems, justice case systems, municipal billing, revenue platforms
  4. 04Hybrid cloud and DRaaS architecture3 topics · includes a case scenario
    • Multi-region designs, landing zones, network segmentation
    • Automation: Infrastructure as Code, runbooks, recovery orchestration
    • Data sovereignty, compliance, and auditability in public sector environments

    Case scenario

    Case Study Lab (Africa): Transnet ports disruption (South Africa) • Design resilience for logistics/ports services, include manual fallback, segregation of OT/IT, and recovery communication plans after cyber disruption affecting terminals and causing force majeure.

  5. 05Planning, cyber resilience, crisis management, and exercises: Building BC and DR plans that work4 topics
    • Minimum contents of BCP and DRP
    • Roles: crisis commander, comms lead, technical lead, vendor lead
    • Escalation and decision rights (shutdown vs contain vs failover)
    • Communication: citizen-facing updates, stakeholder coordination, media handling
  6. 06Ransomware-ready recovery4 topics
    • Clean-room recovery concept
    • Restoring safely: malware scanning, credential resets, golden images
    • Backup hardening: immutability, offline copies, testing restore integrity
    • Identity recovery (AD/Entra ID), privileged access recovery
  7. 07Testing and continuous improvement3 topics · includes a case scenario
    • Test types: tabletop, component restore, partial failover, full failover
    • Evidence for audit and regulators
    • Post-incident review and maturity roadmap

    Case scenario

    Case Study Lab (Africa): Department of Justice ransomware (South Africa) • Apply ransomware playbook + phased restoration approach; build governance for restoration priorities and public communication during system unavailability. Case Study Mini (Africa): City of Johannesburg ransomware impact • Identify single points of failure in citizen services (billing, e-services, call centre) and propose architectural controls and continuity channels.

  8. 08Continuity for e-government and national platforms: Digital government service continuity (platform focus)3 topics · includes a case scenario
    • API gateways, integration middleware, shared services, identity federation
    • Scaling under crisis demand; queueing and rate-limiting during incidents
    • Vendor continuity and SLA design

    Case scenario

    Case Study Lab (Africa): Kenya eCitizen disruption (cyber incident) • Service continuity for national e-services portals: multi-region hosting, DDoS protection, traffic failover, citizen comms, and fraud monitoring.

  9. 09Capstone simulation and executive reporting5 topics

    End-to-end scenario: ransomware + partial power instability + supplier outage

    • Teams execute incident response + DR decision-making + comms
    • Produce an executive brief: impact, actions, restoration timelines, lessons learned

    Executive dashboards and resilience governance

    • Resilience KPIs: recovery readiness, backup success, restore time, test pass rate
    • Board reporting pack and annual resilience plan
    • Budget justification: cost of downtime vs resilience investment

Upcoming dates

No open dates are scheduled at the moment. This programme can be delivered in-house for your organisation.

In-house training

Run this programme for your team

We can deliver PKM437 at your premises, anywhere in Africa, with content aligned to your organisation's internal policies.

Discuss in-house delivery How in-house training works

Related courses

All Strategic and Generic Management programmes

Questions about our courses

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How do I register for a course?

Choose a programme and date, then send an enquiry from the course page — the course and dates are filled in for you. Our team replies with the programme information and registration forms. You can also contact us on WhatsApp at +27 73 708 3507.

Do you offer in-house training at our premises?

Yes. Our group booking option allows us to bring our expert facilitators to your location anywhere in Africa. We can also customise the course content to align with your organisation’s internal policies.

How does pricing work for group bookings?

Pricing depends on your organisation's requirements, so we don't publish it. Please contact us with your programme, group size and preferred dates, and we'll get back to you with the details.

What payment methods do you accept?

We accept electronic funds transfers (EFT), direct bank deposits, and corporate or government purchase orders.

Do online delegates receive certificates?

Yes. Upon successful completion of a virtual course or programme, delegates receive a digital certificate of completion equivalent to our classroom-based training.

Ready to enrol your team?

Enquire about PKM437 and we'll send programme and registration information.

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