Cloud services in Azure, designed, migrated and managed
Cloud services in Azure are the computing, storage, networking, identity and data services Microsoft runs from its data centres, including regions in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Arke Technologies (Pty) Ltd, in Johannesburg, plans, migrates, secures and manages Microsoft Azure for mid-sized and large organisations, public bodies and schools across South Africa.
Azure disaster recovery: Site Recovery, strategy and cost
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) replicates servers continuously to a second location and fails them over when the primary is lost: on-premises VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers to Azure, or Azure to Azure between regions. It is the core of most Azure DR solutions and of DR as a service on Azure. Site Recovery can carry a migration too, although Azure Migrate is now Microsoft's recommended tool for that.
An Azure DR strategy starts with two numbers for each system: how much data you can afford to lose and how long it may be down. Backup and restore suits systems that can wait a day; Site Recovery suits those that must return within hours; active-active designs suit the few that cannot stop.
Azure Site Recovery pricing is per protected instance per month, with each instance free for its first 31 days, plus replica storage, and compute only during a failover or drill. Azure Migrate discovery and assessment carry no charge, and its server replication is free for the first 180 days per machine (Microsoft pricing pages, September 2026). We run failover drills on a schedule written into your SLA and report the result; see backup and disaster recovery.
Cyber security and identity management in Azure
Identity management in Azure. Entra ID with multi-factor authentication and conditional access; Azure Privileged Identity Management for time-limited, approved administrator rights; managed identities instead of stored passwords and keys.- Network. Azure NSG rules on every subnet; private subnets with no default outbound internet access, which becomes the default for new virtual networks under Azure API versions released after 31 March 2026 (Microsoft Learn, September 2026); private endpoints for platform services; Azure Firewall where traffic needs inspection.
- Encryption key management. Key Vault for keys, secrets and certificates, customer-managed keys where policy demands them, rotation and access logs.
- Information protection. The Azure Rights Management Service behind Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels encrypts documents and email wherever they travel.
- APIs. Azure API Management (APIM) security: token validation, rate limits and private networking in front of back-end services.
- Monitoring. Microsoft Defender for Cloud posture checks, Microsoft Sentinel for security events, and Network Watcher for network performance monitoring in Azure.
- An Azure risk assessment before and after migration, with findings ranked and fixed. See Microsoft 365 security and cybersecurity services.
What Azure costs, and what drives it
Last reviewed: September 2026.
- Virtual machine size and the hours each runs; storage volume, tier and snapshots.
- Data transferred out of Azure, and network services such as gateways and firewalls.
- Licences: Azure Hybrid Benefit can reuse eligible Windows Server and SQL Server licences.
- Disaster-recovery standby, backup retention and Site Recovery instances.
- Commitments: reservations and savings plans cut the cost of steady workloads.
- The exchange rate, because much Azure pricing is set in US dollars.
Microsoft's pricing calculator estimates consumption; it leaves out the migration project and months of running old and new side by side. We quote migration as a project and management under your SLA, after an assessment, with the monthly cost model on paper first. Cloud cost optimisation keeps spend in check afterwards.
Governance, compliance, procurement and continuity
- One SLA: incidents prioritised P1 (critical outage) to P4 (low-impact request), with response and resolution targets agreed to your business impact; a monthly service review and report; logged, approved changes; ITIL-aligned practice.
- POPIA: data kept in South African regions unless you decide otherwise, with every copy recorded; section 72 governs transfers abroad. King IV Principle 12 and PFMA or MFMA reporting are supported by architecture, change and access records kept ready for audit.
- Procurement: Level 1 B-BBEE contributor, giving 135% procurement recognition (sworn affidavit available on request); CSD number, SARS tax compliance status and company documents available on request; SBD forms completed where required. Azure consumption can sit in your own subscription, while our migration project and SLA are bought against your purchase order or a tender response; see procuring from Arke.
- Continuity: the tenant, subscriptions, data and credentials are yours; we work through named, logged accounts and document as we go. Adding a workload or region is a change to the SLA, and exit terms are written in from the first day.