Azure Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Migration Readiness and Database Modernization.
Executive Summary
The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) manages some of the most critical public-facing education systems in Kenya, serving over 4 million examination candidates annually, together with parents, teachers, school administrators, universities, government agencies and employers. During national examination result release periods, KNEC’s platforms experience extraordinary traffic spikes, becoming one of the highest-demand citizen-service digital platforms in the country.
During peak results release windows historical access patterns show that examination portals can experience between 15,000 and 40,000 requests per minute, with bursts significantly above normal operating levels as candidates simultaneously attempt to access results from across the country.
In such moments, system availability directly influences public confidence, education progression, university admissions, scholarship allocation, employment verification and national service delivery.
Business Case
Before this engagement, KNEC operated primarily from on-premises infrastructure with no established production cloud environment. A server failure affecting systems that supported the examination results environment exposed a major business-continuity risk. If a similar incident occurred during a national examination results release window, millions of citizens and institutions could be affected. KNEC needed more than backup; it needed a secure, tested, scalable Microsoft Azure recovery platform that could protect critical workloads, reduce downtime risk and create a governed foundation for future migration and modernization.
Azure Assessment and Cloud Foundation
CRAG began by conducting an Azure assessment of KNEC’s environment to understand workload requirements, hosting specifications, compatibility, recovery objectives, sizing and cost estimates. The assessment identified critical servers requiring protection and informed a Microsoft Azure-based Disaster Recovery design. CRAG then designed and deployed an Azure foundation aligned to cloud adoption best practices, including subscriptions, resource groups, virtual networking, subnets, network security controls, storage accounts, Recovery Services Vault, identity and access controls, monitoring, alerting and operational governance.
Solution
The solution architecture combines migration, infrastructure, database and security components across Microsoft Azure. The resilience layer uses Azure Site Recovery, Azure Migrate, Recovery Services Vault, Azure Storage and Azure Virtual Machines for recovery scenarios
Building Cloud Resiliency
The first implementation phase focused on Building Cloud Resiliency through Azure-based Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. The solution protected critical KNEC workloads by replicating two Windows servers using Azure Site Recovery and two Linux workloads using Azure Migrate, selected because kernel compatibility constraints made Azure Migrate the appropriate approach for those Linux systems. Azure Storage and recovery services were configured to provide a secure secondary recovery environment, while structured failover, failback, testing and validation procedures ensured KNEC could recover critical systems during disruption.
Disaster Recovery Operating Model
CRAG delivered a complete Disaster Recovery operating model, not only platform deployment. Deliverables included:
- DR architecture design with RTO/RPO consideration
- Azure Site Recovery deployment for Windows workloads
- Azure Migrate setup for Linux workloads
- network and security configuration
- failover and failback procedures
- DR testing and validation
- monitoring and reporting
- runbooks
- documentation and knowledge transfer
- compliance alignment and
- formal project closure
Test failover and validation activities confirmed that applications and data could be recovered efficiently, strengthening KNEC’s confidence in Azure as a resilience platform.
Results & Benefits
As a result, the client was able to reduce their dependency on a single on-premises site, improved readiness for hardware failures, cyber incidents or regional disruptions, and established the foundation required to expand cloud adoption in a controlled, governed manner. The benefits they gained included:
Cloud-based recovery capability
Stronger operational visibility
Practical migration path for future workloads
Improved data protection
Documented failover and failback processes
FY27 Roadmap and Future Cloud Growth
The client can now approach FY27 with an established Azure landing zone, a working BCDR environment, validated migration tooling and a successful database modernization pilot.
Future phases include fuller workload discovery, prioritized migration waves, migration of core infrastructure and databases, line-of-business application migration, optimization, analytics and eventual innovation opportunities involving automation, advanced reporting and AI-enabled services.
Conclusion
In summary, CRAG helped KNEC move from zero cloud adoption to a resilient Azure-enabled operating model. The project protected nationally important examination systems, established a governed Azure foundation, delivered a successful cloud resiliency implementation, validated a further Azure Database for PostgreSQL modernization path and created a FY27 roadmap for broader migration.
The result is a high-impact, repeatable migrate-and-modernize story: business continuity was the catalyst, Azure was the platform, and modernization became the outcome.
