Our mission is to simplify the lives of our customers.
News BlogKZN believe that the way businesses think about, procure, design, build and operate technology has been broken for a very long time. And that traditional consultancies have done very little to significantly change this. We, along with a few selected others, are doing everything in our powers to fix this.
KZN adopt innovative thinking, experimentation and an iterative approach, underpinned by a faithful and disciplined implementation of a blend of tried and trusted methodologies.
KZN help you define and achieve your goals. We put skin in the game and we get stuff done, as efficiently as possible. We use as much automation as makes sense, and make sure you never need to learn a lesson we already have.
Click here to learn more about the founders' backgrounds; the motivations for establishing KZN; the history and journey; and The KZN Way - our faithful blend and implementation of a number of world renowned methodologies and frameworks.
KZN: from kaizen, the Sino-Japanese word which means change for better.
In modern business parlance and Lean Six Sigma circles, kaizen has come to mean the practice of continuous improvement and is recognised worldwide as an important pillar of a forward thinking organisation’s long-term competitive strategy.
The underlying principles of kaizen are: to nurture the company’s people; to humanise the workplace; to eliminate waste; to take a scientific approach; to standardise and automate; and ultimately work smarter not harder. These same principles are harmoniously aligned with KZN's values and operating principles.
KZN's mission is to simplify the lives of our customers through our wholehearted commitment to the delivery of outstanding service and trustworthy insights.
We will do this by nurturing our talent in an environment which is fulfilling, fostering a culture that passionately lives and breathes our company values and operating principles.
Our values and operating principles are everything to us. They define who we are and how we behave. They set us apart from the rest. Although inspired in part by others, they’re ours; they’re personal; they’re meaningful; and they’re not just marketing spin or words on the wall. We live and breathe them. They’re not up for debate and not for sale at any price.
Do you see yourself reflected in the Values? KZN are always on the look out for expressions of interest from someone who is passionate about their craft, and wants to learn and grow as we do.
Life is a journey and if you’re not at least occasionally operating outside your comfort zone, you’re not growing and learning. We promise to invest in the growth of our staff and ask that they do too.
We start with the aim of simplifying the lives of our customer, and work backwards. Without our customers, we are nothing. We wholeheartedly promise to work hard to earn and keep customer trust.
If we can’t articulate the value, it doesn’t get done. Period. No bureaucracy. No “ticking the box”.
Two ears, one mouth - use them in that ratio. Forget “no, but”, think “yes, and”. By working closely with colleagues, partners, and especially our customers we are guaranteed to improve the outcome.
We live in a complex world, surrounded by complex problems. But often the most efficient, effective and sustainable solutions are the simplest ones. And if you can’t explain something simply, you probably don’t understand it well enough in the first place.
Show courage in your conviction; more individual leadership and accountability; forget titles. No job is above or below us. Forget “that’s not my job” even when it isn’t; own it until you find someone whose job it is!
Be real; be true to yourself; do not seek conformity. Respectfully challenge when you disagree and never sacrifice a good outcome for social cohesion. Once a decision is made, commit wholly. It leads to better outcomes, deeper connections and more productive lasting relationships.
Innovate but avoid reinventing the wheel. Find someone else’s design and improve it.
Work hard and play hard; take action and find time for reflection; shoot for the moon but when it comes to quality, cost and speed of delivery, pick two at the cost of the third.
Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s a vital part of it. Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. Experiment, fail quick, fail cheap – but make sure you learn the lessons. Don’t let ego or pride get in the way of changing your mind if things aren’t working.
With a bias for action, identify minimum quality requirements; accept that good enough is good enough; effectively deliver. Anything above that is inefficient. Anything below that is unacceptable.
It’s in our name! Never be satisfied with the status quo. Life is a journey of personal mastery. If you’re not at least occasionally operating outside your comfort zone, you’re not growing and learning. We promise to invest in the growth of our staff and ask that they do too.
Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self- sufficiency, and invention. We expect a fair reward for our performance. We set our pricing at a level that allows us to invest in ensuring a great experience for our customers. We avoid spending money on things that don’t return positive results for our customers.
We want to help make the world a better place. We will do this through our KZN 4 GD program where staff can dedicate 1 day per month of company time to a good cause of their choosing. That’s 12 days per year, per staff member – just think what we could achieve if all organisations did that!
Life is a journey and if you’re not at least occasionally operating outside your comfort zone, you’re not growing and learning. We promise to invest in the growth of our staff and ask that they do too.
We start with the aim of simplifying the lives of our customer, and work backwards. Without our customers, we are nothing. We wholeheartedly promise to work hard to earn and keep customer trust.
If we can’t articulate the value, it doesn’t get done. Period. No bureaucracy. No “ticking the box”.
Two ears, one mouth - use them in that ratio. Forget “no, but”, think “yes, and”. By working closely with colleagues, partners, and especially our customers we are guaranteed to improve the outcome.
We live in a complex world, surrounded by complex problems. But often the most efficient, effective and sustainable solutions are the simplest ones. And if you can’t explain something simply, you probably don’t understand it well enough in the first place.
Show courage in your conviction; more individual leadership and accountability; forget titles. No job is above or below us. Forget “that’s not my job” even when it isn’t; own it until you find someone whose job it is!
Be real; be true to yourself; do not seek conformity. Respectfully challenge when you disagree and never sacrifice a good outcome for social cohesion. Once a decision is made, commit wholly. It leads to better outcomes, deeper connections and more productive lasting relationships.
Innovate but avoid reinventing the wheel. Find someone else’s design and improve it.
Work hard and play hard; take action and find time for reflection; shoot for the moon but when it comes to quality, cost and speed of delivery, pick two at the cost of the third.
Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s a vital part of it. Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. Experiment, fail quick, fail cheap – but make sure you learn the lessons. Don’t let ego or pride get in the way of changing your mind if things aren’t working.
With a bias for action, identify minimum quality requirements; accept that good enough is good enough; effectively deliver. Anything above that is inefficient. Anything below that is unacceptable.
It’s in our name! Never be satisfied with the status quo. Life is a journey of personal mastery. If you’re not at least occasionally operating outside your comfort zone, you’re not growing and learning. We promise to invest in the growth of our staff and ask that they do too.
Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self- sufficiency, and invention. We expect a fair reward for our performance. We set our pricing at a level that allows us to invest in ensuring a great experience for our customers. We avoid spending money on things that don’t return positive results for our customers.
We want to help make the world a better place. We will do this through our KZN 4 GD program where staff can dedicate 1 day per month of company time to a good cause of their choosing. That’s 12 days per year, per staff member – just think what we could achieve if all organisations did that!
Life is a journey and if you’re not at least occasionally operating outside your comfort zone, you’re not growing and learning. We promise to invest in the growth of our staff and ask that they do too.
A perimeter firewall is no longer an adequate defence from security threats.
A security information and event management (SIEM) solution will monitor your environment from the inside, alerting you when risky or improper actions occur within your network. Sounds great, huh? Unfortunately most SIEM solutions are expensive to deploy and costly to run.
KZN Insight is different. A Software-as-a-Service offering run in the AWS cloud, it’s simple to get started monitoring even the smallest of environments. KZN will manage and monitor the SIEM software: no need for you to feed and water the infrastructure!
Since you pay only for what you use, your operating costs will grow as your network does.
Speak to KZN if you’re keen to start improving the security, compliance and performance of your IT systems today.
The Well-Architected Assessment provides an external set of eyes to carefully and critically examine your existing information technology infrastructure, free from bias or emotional attachment.
KZN will measure your implementation against architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. We’ll measure your environment against six pillars:
Our Assessment Report will itemise all that we find: the good, the bad and the ugly, along with recommendations for remediation.
You’ll know where you stand on your cloud adoption journey.
Do you sleep poorly at night, worried that your information technology environments are like Swiss cheese, full of vulnerabilities ready to exploit?
Few businesses truly understand where they stand when it comes to information security. Even organisations who have started on their journey to address information security risks may not have the capacity to document all that you already know.
No doubt you would rest easier knowing there were changes that, when applied to an existing process, procedure or control would make them more effective in reducing the likelihood of a breach?
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. KZN’s Information Security Assessment (ISA) provides you with a baseline from which the evolution of your information security posture can be measured.
Establishing a solid and comprehensive foundation within AWS, one that aligns strongly with AWS’ Well-Architected Framework, can be an arduous task. Whether you’re just starting on your AWS adoption journey, or you’ve dabbled with a few AWS services for some non-critical workloads, it’s important to invest in establishing a rock-solid baseline.
KZN’s Jumpstart offers out-of-the-box an AWS environment that follows best practices across all the foundational pillars:
A KZN Jumpstart for AWS gives you a head start on your AWS adoption roadmap, allowing you to focus on rapidly delivering awesome value to your customers.
Forewarned is forearmed.
In IT security you want to be one step ahead of the hackers. A KZN Penetration Test provides IT management with a view of their network from a malicious attacker’s perspective. KZN stay ahead of security trends and make sure we’re using up-to-date techniques.
With great care and sensitivity, KZN will simulate an attack on your organisation’s IT infrastructure. We’ll find ways into your network, then provide you with a detailed report summarising the vulnerability, along with advice on how to remediate.
A perimeter firewall is no longer an adequate defence from security threats.
A security information and event management (SIEM) solution will monitor your environment from the inside, alerting you when risky or improper actions occur within your network. Sounds great, huh? Unfortunately most SIEM solutions are expensive to deploy and costly to run.
KZN Insight is different. A Software-as-a-Service offering run in the AWS cloud, it’s simple to get started monitoring even the smallest of environments. KZN will manage and monitor the SIEM software: no need for you to feed and water the infrastructure!
Since you pay only for what you use, your operating costs will grow as your network does.
Speak to KZN if you’re keen to start improving the security, compliance and performance of your IT systems today.
The Well-Architected Assessment provides an external set of eyes to carefully and critically examine your existing information technology infrastructure, free from bias or emotional attachment.
KZN will measure your implementation against architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. We’ll measure your environment against six pillars:
Our Assessment Report will itemise all that we find: the good, the bad and the ugly, along with recommendations for remediation.
You’ll know where you stand on your cloud adoption journey.
Do you sleep poorly at night, worried that your information technology environments are like Swiss cheese, full of vulnerabilities ready to exploit?
Few businesses truly understand where they stand when it comes to information security. Even organisations who have started on their journey to address information security risks may not have the capacity to document all that you already know.
No doubt you would rest easier knowing there were changes that, when applied to an existing process, procedure or control would make them more effective in reducing the likelihood of a breach?
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. KZN’s Information Security Assessment (ISA) provides you with a baseline from which the evolution of your information security posture can be measured.
Establishing a solid and comprehensive foundation within AWS, one that aligns strongly with AWS’ Well-Architected Framework, can be an arduous task. Whether you’re just starting on your AWS adoption journey, or you’ve dabbled with a few AWS services for some non-critical workloads, it’s important to invest in establishing a rock-solid baseline.
KZN’s Jumpstart offers out-of-the-box an AWS environment that follows best practices across all the foundational pillars:
A KZN Jumpstart for AWS gives you a head start on your AWS adoption roadmap, allowing you to focus on rapidly delivering awesome value to your customers.
Forewarned is forearmed.
In IT security you want to be one step ahead of the hackers. A KZN Penetration Test provides IT management with a view of their network from a malicious attacker’s perspective. KZN stay ahead of security trends and make sure we’re using up-to-date techniques.
With great care and sensitivity, KZN will simulate an attack on your organisation’s IT infrastructure. We’ll find ways into your network, then provide you with a detailed report summarising the vulnerability, along with advice on how to remediate.
A perimeter firewall is no longer an adequate defence from security threats.
A security information and event management (SIEM) solution will monitor your environment from the inside, alerting you when risky or improper actions occur within your network. Sounds great, huh? Unfortunately most SIEM solutions are expensive to deploy and costly to run.
KZN Insight is different. A Software-as-a-Service offering run in the AWS cloud, it’s simple to get started monitoring even the smallest of environments. KZN will manage and monitor the SIEM software: no need for you to feed and water the infrastructure!
Since you pay only for what you use, your operating costs will grow as your network does.
Speak to KZN if you’re keen to start improving the security, compliance and performance of your IT systems today.
Our team members bring an average of 15 years honing their skills and gaining qualifications in IT strategy, planning, design, execution, engineering and operations.
Combined, we offer the full gambit of specialist and generalist infrastructure and applications knowledge, all underpinned with security expertise and passion.
Your organisation’s data is an untapped resource that can give you a business edge. Are you making full use of today’s technology and creativity to make use of this resource?
KZN is your end-to-end analytics partner. We leverage modern cloud native services to create innovative analytics solutions, from building data pipelines to developing applications.
DevOps is Agile. By building and supporting cross-functional teams with the right tooling, you can empower teams to spend their time on value-creating activity that helps you identify and deliver what your customers need most.
Your DevOps journey is unique, and as cloud experts we will partner with you to help you identify any gaps and use your project to start building out DevOps culture and practices.
We live and breathe Atlassian at KZN. In fact, all of our business processes - including recruitment, human resources, accounts receivable, and of course project management - have been built in-house into Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud.
If you’re just starting on your adoption journey, KZN can help you get started with analysis, design, and implementation expertise. If you’ve been using Jira for a while, we can help consolidate instances, rationalise out-of-control projects, streamline convoluted workflows, or lift project reporting to a new level. We can also manage your platforms, as a service.
KZN Group ensure we deliver awesome value to your business by applying just the right amount of project management expertise to suit your project and your company culture. We’ll bring structure, transparency, and control to any sized project, employing best-of-breed methodologies such as Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), PRINCE2, PRINCE2 Agile, or Managing Successful Programs (MSP). And we’re not afraid to mix things up when required - we’ll borrow from whichever methodology will get the job done! You’ll be left in no doubt as to what needs to be done, by whom, by when, and how we’re tracking to achieve those goals.
AWS Lambda allows your organisation to run code without needing to worry about the underlying servers. Lambda automatically scales based on load. Instead of trying to provision servers to meet maximum loads, with Lambda, you just pay for the compute that you need, lowering your costs. You also save on managing and patching servers.
Serverless environments replace the functionality previously provided by separate on-premises or cloud servers (to manage applications, security and databases) by services that are used as needed.
KZN has broad experience in developing secure and robust enterprise scale serverless solutions using AWS Lambda.
CloudFormation is a key AWS technology that KZN has gained extensive experience in. Using CloudFormation allows repeatable, easy deployment of an entire solution with one action.
KZN uses CloudFormation because it simplifies the build process and allows the AWS infrastructure to be stored as code, alongside the application source code. This provides a single source of truth for the entire solution.
Your organisation’s data is an untapped resource that can give you a business edge. Are you making full use of today’s technology and creativity to make use of this resource?
KZN is your end-to-end analytics partner. We leverage modern cloud native services to create innovative analytics solutions, from building data pipelines to developing applications.
DevOps is Agile. By building and supporting cross-functional teams with the right tooling, you can empower teams to spend their time on value-creating activity that helps you identify and deliver what your customers need most.
Your DevOps journey is unique, and as cloud experts we will partner with you to help you identify any gaps and use your project to start building out DevOps culture and practices.
We live and breathe Atlassian at KZN. In fact, all of our business processes - including recruitment, human resources, accounts receivable, and of course project management - have been built in-house into Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud.
If you’re just starting on your adoption journey, KZN can help you get started with analysis, design, and implementation expertise. If you’ve been using Jira for a while, we can help consolidate instances, rationalise out-of-control projects, streamline convoluted workflows, or lift project reporting to a new level. We can also manage your platforms, as a service.
KZN Group ensure we deliver awesome value to your business by applying just the right amount of project management expertise to suit your project and your company culture. We’ll bring structure, transparency, and control to any sized project, employing best-of-breed methodologies such as Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), PRINCE2, PRINCE2 Agile, or Managing Successful Programs (MSP). And we’re not afraid to mix things up when required - we’ll borrow from whichever methodology will get the job done! You’ll be left in no doubt as to what needs to be done, by whom, by when, and how we’re tracking to achieve those goals.
AWS Lambda allows your organisation to run code without needing to worry about the underlying servers. Lambda automatically scales based on load. Instead of trying to provision servers to meet maximum loads, with Lambda, you just pay for the compute that you need, lowering your costs. You also save on managing and patching servers.
Serverless environments replace the functionality previously provided by separate on-premises or cloud servers (to manage applications, security and databases) by services that are used as needed.
KZN has broad experience in developing secure and robust enterprise scale serverless solutions using AWS Lambda.
CloudFormation is a key AWS technology that KZN has gained extensive experience in. Using CloudFormation allows repeatable, easy deployment of an entire solution with one action.
KZN uses CloudFormation because it simplifies the build process and allows the AWS infrastructure to be stored as code, alongside the application source code. This provides a single source of truth for the entire solution.
Your organisation’s data is an untapped resource that can give you a business edge. Are you making full use of today’s technology and creativity to make use of this resource?
KZN is your end-to-end analytics partner. We leverage modern cloud native services to create innovative analytics solutions, from building data pipelines to developing applications.