Cybersecurity assessment and audit
A baseline across identity, devices, email, network, cloud, backups and policy, including vulnerability and network scanning, with a ranked remediation plan.
A cyber security company in South Africa that answers for the outcome
Arke Technologies (Pty) Ltd is a Johannesburg cyber security company that assesses, hardens, monitors and supports the systems South African organisations, government bodies and schools run on. For buyers comparing cyber security companies in South Africa, we pair board-level governance and POPIA reporting with hands-on engineering, under one SLA and one accountable team.
What's cyber security? A plain definition
What's cyber security, in one sentence? It is the practice of protecting computers, networks, applications and data from attack, damage and unauthorised access, and of recovering quickly when protection fails. That definition of cyber security leads to the board's question: what protection do we need, and who is accountable for it?
Information security is the wider discipline. It protects information in any form, whether a database, a paper file or a conversation, for confidentiality, integrity and availability. Network security, application security and the security of the computers and phones people carry are all parts of it.
Physical information security belongs in the same plan. A locked server room, controlled access to the comms cabinet and the secure disposal of old drives stop attacks that no firewall sees. Physical security is easy to overlook in schools, clinics and branch offices, where equipment often sits in shared spaces.
Assurance in information security is the evidence that all of this works: audit results, test reports, monitoring data and a record of incidents handled. Data privacy and cybersecurity meet in POPIA, which requires every organisation to secure the personal information it holds. For a longer primer, read what is cyber security.
Cyber security requirements in South Africa
Cyber security in South Africa is shaped less by one cyber law than by several obligations that each assume good security. The cyber security requirements most organisations must meet:
POPIA. Section 19 requires appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, and section 22 requires notice to the Information Regulator and the people affected after a security compromise. See POPIA compliance and our POPIA compliance checklist.- King IV. Principle 12 makes the governing body responsible for technology and information governance, and cyber risk sits squarely inside it. See King IV and technology governance.
- PFMA and MFMA. Accounting officers in departments, public entities and municipalities must manage risk and keep proper records, and the IT controls around those records form part of how they are audited.
- ISO standards for information security. ISO/IEC 27001 defines an information security management system and ISO/IEC 27002 the supporting controls. Certification is voluntary, but tenders and enterprise customers often ask for alignment. See ISO 27001 readiness.
- Contracts and insurance. Enterprise customers, banks and cyber insurers often set their own security clauses: multi-factor authentication, tested backups and patching timelines.
Risk management and cyber security work as one process: a documented risk assessment decides which controls you need and in what order. The ISO standard for cyber security that buyers and auditors ask about most is ISO/IEC 27001. We work to it alongside the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and CIS Controls, and lead with whichever framework your auditors, customers or regulators already recognise.
Our cybersecurity services
Our cyber security services and IT security solutions cover the full cycle: find the weaknesses, fix them, watch for attacks, respond when one lands and prove it all to the board. Each is available on its own or inside one managed agreement, and cybersecurity is one of the seven disciplines across our IT services.
Penetration testing
Authorised, simulated attacks on your network, applications and cloud, scoped, performed and retested by our team.
Managed detection and response
Log collection, alerting and response through Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender, with human response to the times in your SLA.
Microsoft 365 security and zero trust
Conditional access, multi-factor authentication, Intune device compliance, sensitivity labels and data-loss prevention in Microsoft 365.
Email security
Phishing and impersonation defences, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and safer handling of links and attachments.
Ransomware and endpoint protection
Endpoint protection, patching, application control and backups that ransomware cannot reach.
Incident response and digital forensics
Containment, evidence handling, recovery and POPIA notification support.
POPIA compliance and ISO 27001 readiness
Gap analysis, policies, controls and audit preparation. See POPIA compliance and ISO 27001 readiness.
Security awareness training
Practical training for staff, educators and councillors, with simulated phishing to measure progress.
Virtual CISO and cyber security consulting
Strategy, policy, board reporting and cyber risk management from a named security lead.
Security architecture: designing security into IT infrastructure
Security in IT infrastructure works best when it is designed in rather than added later. Information security architecture decides, before anything is built, where trust boundaries sit, which identities can reach which systems and how data moves. SABSA (Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture) is a well-known enterprise security architecture method that derives every control from a business requirement; we design to the same principle, so each control can be traced to the risk it answers.
In practice, infrastructure security comes down to five decisions:
- Identity first. Entra ID or Active Directory as the single source of identity, multi-factor authentication on every account, and privileged accounts kept apart from everyday ones.
- Segmented networks. Firewalls and VLANs that keep guests, learners, CCTV, finance systems and servers apart. See network infrastructure.
- Certificates and keys. Public key infrastructure (PKI) is the system of certificates and keys that proves a server, device or person is genuine. We track certificates so none expires and takes a service down with it.
- Patch management. Unglamorous and decisive: systems, firmware and applications updated on a schedule, with every exception recorded and approved.
- Secure software. Applications from our custom software development and systems integration work follow OWASP guidance.
Cloud and security go together only when the configuration is right. We secure workloads on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and review SaaS security settings (sharing, admin roles, third-party apps) in the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace tenants we manage through business software. On AWS, for example, security starts with a locked-down root account, least-privilege roles and logging switched on. See cloud services and Amazon Web Services.
Critical infrastructure and cyber security raise the stakes. Municipalities, utilities, mines and plants run operational technology (OT) that controls physical processes, and OT cyber security starts at the boundary: separating plant networks from office networks and controlling exactly what crosses between them. See IT for mining, manufacturing and industrial operations.
Managed IT security services: security run to an SLA
Most organisations do not need another security product; they need someone to run the ones they have. Managed IT security services put that work under contract: monitoring, patching, access reviews, alert handling and monthly reporting, done by one team to an SLA. MSP cybersecurity belongs inside the managed service rather than beside it, so security operations can be written into the same SLA as our managed IT services.
Our managed services cyber security work runs on our own tooling, including a remote-access platform hosted on our own servers in Johannesburg. Monitoring checks each computer every 15 minutes and raises faults as tickets automatically, and where Microsoft Sentinel is deployed, security events from Microsoft 365, Entra ID, endpoints and firewalls flow into it and detection rules turn them into incidents. Every remote session is approved and logged. To be precise about scope: monitoring is automated and continuous, but Arke does not run a staffed, always-on security operations centre. Human response follows the priority targets agreed in your SLA, and out-of-hours cover can be written into it where your business needs it.
IT security management also means planning for bad days. Incident management needs a written plan and named decision-makers; disaster recovery needs backups that ransomware cannot reach and restores that have been tested. See incident response and backup and disaster recovery. Data analytics and cyber security meet in the reporting: our data and analytics team turns log and ticket data into trends a steering committee can act on.
Governance and reporting a board can use
- A written SLA, set to your needs, with incidents prioritised P1 to P4 (P1 a critical outage through P4 a low-impact request) and response and resolution targets matched to what downtime costs you.
- A named service lead, with a documented escalation path above them.
- Monthly service reviews and written reports for an IT steering committee, audit committee or school governing body, not only for technicians.
- Change control. Security changes are logged, assessed and approved before they are made, against documented runbooks.
- Audit-ready records. Evidence of controls, tests and incidents, kept so that internal and external auditors can rely on it.
- King IV, PFMA and MFMA fit. Reporting that supports the governing body's technology and information governance duty and the accounting officer's duty to manage risk. See IT governance, risk and compliance.
Procurement and continuity
Arke Technologies (Pty) Ltd is a Level 1 B-BBEE contributor, which gives buyers 135% procurement recognition (sworn affidavit available on request). Company documents, our CSD supplier number, SARS tax compliance status and a bank confirmation letter are available on request, and we complete standard bidding documents (SBD forms) when a bid requires them. You can buy through a proposal and SLA, a purchase order or a tender response. See our company facts and procuring from Arke.
Continuity is written into the contract. Work is delivered remote-first by a certified team under one contract, so adding sites or users changes the SLA schedule, not the supplier. You own your data, credentials, logs and documentation throughout; configurations and runbooks are recorded as we work, and at the end of a term we hand everything over in an orderly exit. Everyone with access to your systems is bound by confidentiality and our security controls.
What cyber security services cost
Last reviewed: September 2026.
Cyber security for companies is priced in two ways. Ongoing managed security is priced like managed IT, per user per month, set after an assessment and fixed in the SLA. Published South African managed IT rates run from about R180 to R400 per user per month (matnet.co.za, September 2026), with some providers listing R450 (MiBOT, September 2026), and the security scope inside those rates varies widely, so compare what is included, not only the figure. Assessments, penetration tests, ISO 27001 readiness and incident preparation are quoted per project. The price follows users and devices, sites and cloud environments, internet-facing systems, the compliance evidence you need and any out-of-hours cover. See our penetration testing cost guide.
Work our team has delivered
Our team runs ongoing managed IT and cybersecurity for client organisations in South Africa: Microsoft 365 hardening, Microsoft Sentinel SIEM deployment, Entra ID governance, Linux server administration and POPIA compliance management. See managed security operations. Sector pages cover cybersecurity for government, municipalities and SOEs and cybersecurity, POPIA and online safety for schools.