Microsoft Azure Review

Scalability, affordability and the flexibility of the product.

• You can off-site required services to help mitigate risk
• You can take advantage of the scalability to have short term high intensive processes be used by their services
• You can totally take away the need for any server hardware in your organisation

Probably the 2 main areas where things could be improved are getting direct console access to VM's and its Azure backup solution to add backup types (eg System State).

3 months

We went with the volume license of credits and still find it difficult to activate those credits as there is a particular website you have to go to.

There has been documented issues with stability, however we did not experience it.

No issues encountered.

Good, I can shoot email questions and get responses in a good amount of time.

I haven't had to raise a technical support for Azure though for Office 365 I have and I've found it excellent.

We looked at AWS, a locally based cloud provider and a datacentre.

It was a learning curve to get it up and running. If I had prior training I would have found it straight forward but the time lines for implementation meant I had to "dive in".

In-house

We are able to provide services to clients that allows us get a good ROI once we have deployed Azure to them.

• Setup cost with Azure is minimal for what they are supplying. Everything takes less than 10 minutes to deploy.
• Day to Day costs is what you use, we can now review those costs and look at the new features (Automation) to make those costs even more efficient.

We looked at AWS, a locally based cloud provider and a datacentre.

Get onboard with Microsoft and the Azure team and listen out to their partner training. They did a big Azure for IT Pros via their channel 9 msdn a few weeks ago. There is plenty of webinars and e-books which will teach you what you want to know.