Incidents
Faults on laptops, desktops, printers and phones; Microsoft 365, Exchange Online, Teams and Google Workspace; Windows, macOS and Linux; line-of-business platforms such as Zoho, Sage, Salesforce and HubSpot.
IT service desk and helpdesk services, run to an SLA
A service desk is the single point of contact where staff report IT faults and requests, and where each one is tracked to resolution against agreed times. Arke Technologies runs an ITIL-aligned IT service desk from Johannesburg for organisations, public bodies and schools across South Africa, under one service-level agreement.
What does a service desk do?
A service desk is where IT meets its users. Staff log a fault or a request once, by phone or email, or monitoring logs it for them; the desk records it, sets a priority, fixes what it can at first contact and escalates the rest, then confirms the fix and closes the ticket. Every step runs against a clock written into the SLA, which is what separates service desk services from an informal "ask the IT person" arrangement.
Whatever your organisation calls it (service desk, help desk, helpdesk, servicedesk or deskhelp), the test is the same: one number, one queue, one owner for every ticket. Staff are the desk's customers, so IT customer support is judged like any other service: speed, courtesy and whether the fix holds. In the public sector the same function is usually called the ICT service desk, and in universities and colleges it often serves students as well as staff.
What our service desk handles
Service requests
IT user support services for joiners, movers and leavers: accounts, licences, access, devices and software, fulfilled against documented runbooks.
Infrastructure tickets
Server, network and firewall faults, including Fortinet, Sophos and MikroTik devices, and cloud workloads on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Problems
Repeat faults investigated to their cause, so the same ticket stops coming back.
Changes
Planned changes logged, assessed and approved before they are made.
Knowledge
Fixes written up in a knowledge base so the next agent resolves the same fault faster.
Devices behind the desk are covered by end-user computing and device and IT asset management; ageing servers by Windows Server upgrades.
Ticketing system or service? Choosing IT helpdesk software
Plenty of software for helpdesk work exists, from free ticketing tools to enterprise platforms with a rules engine, service catalogue and asset register built in. A ticketing system for an IT help desk is necessary, but it is not a desk: someone still has to answer, fix and report. A vendor demo shows the software, not the service, so ask any provider who picks up the ticket and against what clock.
Our desk runs on our own tooling: monitoring that raises tickets automatically, a remote-access platform built on open-source RustDesk and hosted on our Johannesburg servers, and ticketing tied to the SLA. We are building this into Hesper, our IT operations platform, launching in November 2026. If your team already runs its own IT helpdesk software, the SLA names the service desk system that holds each ticket, so nothing is tracked twice.
Governance, reporting and compliance
- SLA response and resolution targets by priority. Every ticket is prioritised P1 to P4, from a critical outage (P1) to a low-impact request (P4), with targets matched to the business impact of downtime and agreed in your SLA.
- Monthly service review and report: ticket volumes and trends, SLA performance, repeat faults, security, patching and backups.
- A named service lead for each client and a documented escalation path, with change control on anything that alters your systems.
- POPIA by design. The desk sees personal information daily, so every remote session is approved and logged, and everyone with access to your systems is bound by confidentiality and our security controls.
- Audit-ready records for King IV, PFMA and MFMA reporting: ticket history, change records and access logs.
See ITIL and IT service management for the practice behind the desk, and POPIA compliance for the wider programme.
Hours, cover and procurement
Standard cover runs in business hours: Monday to Friday 08:00–17:00 and Saturday 09:00–13:00 (SAST). Monitoring runs continuously and logs faults as tickets at any hour, and out-of-hours and weekend cover is available by agreement. A global IT service desk that follows the sun suits a multinational; ours is a South African desk working South African hours, with extended cover written into the SLA where you need it.
For procurement, Arke Technologies is a Level 1 B-BBEE contributor (sworn affidavit available on request), with company documents, a bank confirmation letter, our CSD number and SARS tax compliance status available on request; we complete standard bidding documents where a bid requires them. If you leave, you keep your ticket history, knowledge base, runbooks and credentials. Growing organisations can start with IT support for small and growing businesses.
