Cloud services supply computing, storage, networking and software over the internet, paid for as you use them. Arke Technologies (Pty) Ltd, based in Johannesburg, designs, migrates, secures and manages cloud services on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and private infrastructure for mid-sized and large organisations, public bodies and schools across South Africa.
Cloud services are IT resources you rent from a provider's data centres instead of buying and housing them: virtual servers, storage, databases, networks and finished applications, reached over the internet and billed by use or subscription. Email in Microsoft 365, files in Google Drive and a website on a virtual server are everyday examples of services in cloud computing.
The provider runs large pools of servers, storage and network equipment in regional data centres and divides them, through virtualisation, into resources each customer provisions on demand through a web console or an API. The platform meters what you use and bills for it. Because capacity is shared and elastic, scalable cloud services can grow for a month-end run or an exam season and shrink afterwards, and paying only for what that scalability actually uses is one of the main reasons organisations move.
Responsibility is shared. The provider secures the buildings, hardware and platform; you, or the team you appoint, stay responsible for identities, configuration, data and who can see it. Misconfiguration on the customer's side of that line causes many cloud incidents, which is why cloud consulting and management matter as much as the platform. For a plain-language primer, read cloud computing explained.
Arke is a cloud company in the practical sense: we do not run a hyperscale platform; we design, build and operate workloads on the leading platforms and on your own infrastructure. Our IT cloud services cover the whole lifecycle.
A consultation with our cloud consultants produces a target architecture, a platform recommendation and a business case. Our enterprise cloud architect settles identity, networking, security, applications and cost in one design before anything is built.
Assessment, wave planning, cutover and rollback for servers, databases and applications.
Design, build and management on each platform.
VMware, Hyper-V and Proxmox clusters, with hardware sized and supplied through Server Hub, our trading division.
Server rooms built to sensible standards for power, cooling, UPS and racking, and client equipment placed and managed in South African colocation data centres.
Storage cloud services for backup, off-site copies, written recovery plans and tested restores.
Managed hosting for websites, web applications and mail on cloud servers in South African regions. Cloud computing vs hosting is a false choice: most hosting now runs on cloud infrastructure.
Right-sizing, reservations, storage tiers and monthly cost reporting.
Managed IT cloud services under the same SLA as the rest of your estate: monitoring, patching, backups, access reviews and a monthly service review.
Cloud services integration connects these platforms to your ERP, payroll, CRM and line-of-business systems through APIs; see systems integration. Reporting on cloud data runs through data, analytics and business intelligence, and AI workloads through AI consulting and implementation.
Cloud servers are virtual machines rented by the hour or the month, for a file service, a line-of-business application or a website. A dedicated cloud server, or dedicated host, gives you physical hardware no other customer shares, for licensing or isolation reasons. Hosting a cloud server is often the first step out of an ageing server room.
A cloud server with a GPU suits AI inference, model testing and analytics that arrive in bursts. For steady, heavy AI work, owning the hardware can cost less over its working life than renting the same capacity, and keeps sensitive data on premises; we model both before you decide. Server Hub supplies GPU servers and AI workstations, and our private AI service designs the deployment. We confirm which GPU instance types South African regions offer before designing around one.
Cloud security is mostly configuration: who can sign in, what they can reach, what is exposed to the internet, and whether anyone would notice a change. Every environment we build starts from a baseline of multi-factor authentication, least-privilege roles, network security groups and firewall rules, encryption in transit and at rest, central logging and alerting, and backups an attacker cannot delete. See cybersecurity services.
We work to controls aligned with ISO/IEC 27001, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Controls and Cloud Security Alliance guidance. ISO/IEC 27017 is the ISO cloud security standard, a code of practice for cloud security controls, and ISO/IEC 27018 covers personal information in public clouds. A platform's certification covers the platform, not your configuration, so no cloud services certification on a provider's compliance page replaces your own controls. Our engineers are hired for experience, education and certifications, in step with the contracts we sign.
POPIA requires appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures to secure personal information (section 19), and places conditions on sending it outside South Africa (section 72). Keeping data in South African regions, recording where every copy lives and controlling access answer most of both; see POPIA compliance.
King IV Principle 12 makes the governing body responsible for technology and information governance, and a move to the cloud changes the risks it oversees; see IT governance, risk and compliance. Public-sector clients buy and report under the PFMA or MFMA, and we work to those disciplines, with architecture records, change logs, access logs and SLA reports kept ready for audit.
Cloud services disadvantages are real, and a provider that does not name them will not manage them.
Last reviewed: September 2026.
A cloud bill has two parts: the platform's charge for consumption, and the cost of designing, migrating and running the environment. Consumption depends on:
AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud each publish their prices and a pricing calculator, so the consumption part can be estimated before anything is committed; what the calculators leave out is the migration project, months of running old and new side by side, and exchange-rate exposure. The running cost depends on the number of servers and applications, security and compliance requirements, and the hours of cover you need. Reserved pricing for steady workloads, and switching off what nobody uses, often save more than choosing between providers on list price.
We quote migration as a project and cloud management as a monthly fee set after the assessment, with the consumption model on paper before you commit.
Procuring from Arke and our company facts hold the details procurement teams ask for.
Your cloud accounts, subscriptions and data belong to you. We build in your own tenancy wherever the platform allows, hold administrative access through named, logged accounts, and document as we go. If you leave, you keep the accounts, data, credentials, architecture documentation and runbooks, under exit terms written into the SLA from the first day.
Delivery is remote-first, with one contract and one accountable team, so a new site, region or workload is a change to the SLA rather than a new supplier. We deliver cloud-based IT services and solutions for enterprise IT teams, government and the public sector and schools and education from our head office in Greenstone Hill, Johannesburg; the full list is on our services page.
