Salesforce
Salesforce Consulting
Cloud23 provides Salesforce consulting to banks, insurers and enterprises across Africa and beyond, covering org audits, target architecture, transformation roadmaps and Centre of Excellence design.
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Enterprise Architecture Advisory
Cloud23 provides enterprise architecture advisory for organisations building on Salesforce, MuleSoft and AWS — current-state assessment, target-state design, transformation roadmaps and standing design authority, with particular depth in financial services.
Enterprise architecture is the practice of designing how an organisation's technology — applications, data, integration and infrastructure — fits together to serve its strategy, so that individual investment decisions add up to a coherent whole rather than a collection of point solutions. Cloud23 provides enterprise architecture advisory for organisations building on Salesforce, MuleSoft and AWS: current-state assessment, target-state design, transformation roadmaps and ongoing design authority.
In financial services, where most of our work sits, architecture decisions carry decade-long consequences: how digital channels relate to the core banking system, where the customer master lives, how integration is layered, what happens to the legacy estate. Getting these decisions right early is dramatically cheaper than repairing them later — and they are exactly the decisions individual project teams are not positioned to make.
Cloud23's architects are practitioners. The people who design target states also lead delivery across Salesforce, MuleSoft and AWS — the ecosystems where our expertise runs deepest, alongside modern core banking platforms such as Thought Machine. That keeps the architecture honest: we produce decisions and sequenced roadmaps sized to what teams can actually build, not shelfware frameworks.
What you get
Deliverables
Current-state assessment and capability map
A clear picture of the systems, integrations and data flows you have, mapped to business capabilities and scored for fitness, cost and risk.
Target-state architecture
The destination architecture and the principles behind it, with options and trade-offs made explicit rather than buried in a single recommendation.
Transformation roadmap
Sequenced initiatives with dependencies, indicative sizing and decision points — a plan a steering committee can govern against.
Integration and data architecture blueprint
How systems will exchange data and where authoritative sources live — usually the difference between an estate that composes and one that tangles.
Design authority and governance
A working design authority: standards, review cadence and decision records that keep delivery aligned to the target state without becoming a bottleneck.
Technology selection support
Structured evaluation of platform and vendor options — including a straight answer on where Salesforce should and should not be the choice.
How we work
A delivery approach built for enterprise
- 01
Discover
Interviews and workshops with business and technology stakeholders to understand strategy, constraints and the decisions the architecture must serve.
- 02
Assess
A systematic review of the current estate — systems, integrations, data, costs and risks — validated with the people who run it.
- 03
Design
Target-state options are developed and stress-tested with your architects, with regulatory expectations in view where they apply.
- 04
Roadmap
The agreed target state becomes a sequenced, dependency-aware roadmap with clear early wins and reversible decision points.
- 05
Govern
We stay engaged through delivery — chairing or supporting the design authority — so the roadmap survives contact with real projects.
When it fits
Consider this when
- A major platform investment is imminent and the board wants confidence in the architecture before money is committed.
- The systems estate has grown through acquisitions and projects, and no one holds an accurate picture of the whole.
- Salesforce is expanding beyond CRM into onboarding, service or marketing, and the estate-level design questions are getting harder.
- Regulators, auditors or investors are asking for a credible technology roadmap.
- Project teams keep making architectural decisions by default because there is no design authority to make them deliberately.
In practice
Example engagements
- A target-state architecture for a bank consolidating customer onboarding and servicing onto Salesforce, with a MuleSoft integration layer between the platform and its core systems.
- An independent architecture review of a proposed programme before investment approval, with a written opinion on risks, alternatives and sequencing.
- A fractional chief-architect arrangement: a senior Cloud23 architect embedded part-time to lead the design authority and mentor internal architects.
- An estate rationalisation study across CRM, onboarding and servicing systems accumulated through mergers and successive projects.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is enterprise architecture?
Enterprise architecture is the discipline of designing an organisation's technology landscape as a whole — applications, data, integration and infrastructure — so it serves business strategy and evolves coherently. It answers the structural questions individual projects cannot: what the target estate looks like, what order to change it in, and which standards keep hundreds of small decisions pointing the same way.
Do we need enterprise architecture for a Salesforce programme?
For a single-cloud implementation, usually not as a formal discipline. But the moment Salesforce touches core systems, holds customer master data or spans several business units, you are making estate-level decisions whether or not anyone is named architect. A short architecture engagement at the start is far cheaper than re-platforming an integration approach two years in.
What frameworks does Cloud23 use?
Our practice is TOGAF-informed but deliberately pragmatic: we use standard notations and artefact types where they aid communication, and drop ceremony that does not serve a decision. Every artefact we produce exists to support a specific choice someone has to make.
How long does an architecture engagement take?
An independent review of a programme or proposal typically takes a few weeks. A current-state assessment with target-state design and roadmap is usually a two-to-three-month engagement, depending on estate size and stakeholder availability. Standing design authority is an ongoing, part-time arrangement.
What makes Cloud23's architecture practice different?
Our architects deliver as well as design — the same people stay engaged through build, which disciplines the design work towards what is implementable. And our depth is concentrated: Salesforce-centred estates in financial services, with the integration and data questions that dominate them, rather than generalist coverage of everything.
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Ready to talk enterprise architecture?
A short conversation with our team is the fastest way to understand whether this is the right engagement for you, and what it would involve.