What is Microsoft Azure?

Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform where developers can create, deploy, and maintain their apps. This cloud application platform allows developers to concentrate on the actual applications, while it takes care of all the elements behind the apps.

Windows Azure offers open across multiple frameworks,languages, and tools. It is fully scalable, localized in that it is hosted globally in many datacenters, and has widespread capabilities are, catering for all elements of application development, deployment, and management.

Azure is comprised of several different service modules,including Infrastructure; Web; Mobile; Dev & Test; Big Data; Media;Storage, Backup & Recovery; and Identity & Access Management.

Also known as

Windows Azure

Sample customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.

Microsoft Azure Reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars

(13)

Aaron Krytus

Network Manager / Senior Network Engineer at Warnock, Tanner & Associates

Jun 09 2017

We've been able to create VMs for development as we ran out of resources locally, but the new portal doesn't feel intuitive.

Valuable Features: Customized Dashboard, Site-to-site and point-to-Site VPN, Virtual Machines, Web Apps, SQL, SharePoint, Storage, Test/Dev environments. • Improvements to My Organization: Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating Hybrid... more »

4 comments

Avinash MendseYou have taken right decision, today's world is for scale if you want to grow... more »

Farooq AliMicrosoft is improving his Azure services but still faild to announce... more »

Robert Lisiecki

Software Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

There are limits to resources you can use in Azure, but it enables us to offload demand from our data center when additional hosting capacity is required without notice.

Valuable Features: Resource manager API Cloud storage Virtual machine hosting • Improvements to My Organization: Our company plans to use Azure for training and for internal use. We use ADFS and the cloud storage mostly. We are also moving to host labs in Azure to offload demand... more »

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seniorin683115

Senior Information Technology Manager at a financial services firm

Jun 14 2017

We have the ability to quickly create and manage resources is critical to getting things done, Azure just makes getting things done a lot simpler.

Valuable Features: The ability to quickly create and manage resources is critical to getting things done, Azure just makes getting things done a lot simpler. • Improvements to My Organization: Getting resources up and running quickly and providing secure access to those resources makes... more »

Roman Nedzelsky, MVP

Senior Consultant | Architect at DHL

Jun 04 2017

The most valuable feature is using different types of servers on one environment.

Valuable Features: The most valuable feature is the possibility of using Microsoft and non-Microsoft services on one environment. For example, Windows servers, Linux servers, backup solutions from Veeam, etc. There is no one special feature for me, as it makes sense as a complete package. I... more »

Francis Olowu

Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 27 2017

Some of the valuable features include monitoring, management, and data analytics.

Valuable Features: Compute (App service, and virtual machine scale sets): The ability to manage Windows and Linus virtual machines. Monitoring and Management: Ability to use log analytics to search, collect and visualize machine data from on-premises and cloud. Data Analytics: Security and... more »

Oktay Sari

Lead Engineer Solutions at a media company with 51-200 employees

Jul 12 2017

It has helped us to scale, no matter what feature you use and scalability is of the upmost importance to us.

Valuable Features: We have most of our servers running as VM's in Azure. While still a hybrid environment, we are gradually moving all our servers and applications to Azure. Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Domain Services make it possible to have Azure VM's join a domain... more »

VincentLukken

Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 15 2017

A humongous amount of features are available. It is difficult to keep up with the continuous improvements that they do.

Valuable Features: The availability of the humongous amount of features and solutions in Azure are most valuable to us. • Improvements to My Organization: The continuous improvement of Microsoft is amazing. The agility and speed at which Microsoft is doing all this is really amazing. •... more »

reviewer120534

CTO at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Jun 15 2017

It provides hybrid IT management of the on-premise and cloud workloads.

Valuable Features: Features such as Azure object storage, IaaS, Azure System Center, Azure SQL Database are valuable to me. • Improvements to My Organization: It provides: Scalable workload with elastic cloud capabilities Hybrid IT management of the on-premise and cloud workloads ... more »

Erwin Fiebig

IT & PMO Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 17 2017

Has integration with Active Directory and Office 365.

Valuable Features: Quick and easy deployment Complete packaged solutions to deploy (Web Apps service) Clear pricing Low cost Easy scaling Cost effectiveness (stopping a VM when not in use) High availability Easy restore and recovery Integration with Active Directory and Office 365. There are... more »

PeterSimonsen

Director of IT at a health, wellness and fitness company with 51-200 employees

May 08 2017

It enables a breakdown of IT silos and speeds up micro-service architectures.

Valuable Features: In general, the entire suite of PaaS is valuable. It enables a true breakdown of IT siloes and allows an organization to embrace DevOps. It speeds up micro-service architectures and provides interesting and new opportunities to staff, generating morale boosts. •... more »

GregSchulz

Server and StorageIO Group (Storage IO): Independent IT Advisor, Author, Blogger and Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

May 03 2017

This product has facilitated development, testing, and deployment.

Valuable Features: Virtual machines, both Windows and Linux based Blob storage Azure file storage SQL server • Improvements to My Organization: This product has facilitated development, testing, rapid deployment, spot resource needs, with a remote off-site that compliments on-premises for... more »

Kleyn Guerreiro

IT Analyst at a government with 501-1,000 employees

The Canvas flow interface brings a very nice functionality that improves self-learning.

Valuable Features: The Canvas flow interface brings a very nice functionality that improves self-learning. • Improvements to My Organization: Selecting and applying a machine learning algorithm is not a click-and-run process. In this case, clustering our data has helped us to find patterns... more »

Alejandro Urcuyo

Technical Solutions Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have lower production times because we don't make any more hardware purchases or have software and vendor support contracts.

Valuable Features: Easy and fast provisioning of Cloud Services including Web sites, Virtual Machines and Databases. Great for application development testing, staging and production slots. Better Support and community than the others. The onboarding services are great for new... more »

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Articles

Orlee Gillis

Content and Community Manager

IT Central Station

May 29 2017

Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon AWS -- New Reviews for Q2 2017

What are enterprise tech professionals saying about Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS in Q2 2017? In this review face-off between two dominant players in the PaaS cloud market, users share their favorite features and benefits found in these tools. Microsoft Azure: What Users Love Peter... more »

2 comments

AndyLeeWe deploy Azure—connecting cloud and on-premises with consistent hybrid cloud... more »

Ricardo Dolinski GarridoInteresting, and the offer in the cloud: "as a a Service" in Business... more »

User Assessments By Topic About Microsoft Azure

Valuable Features

Customized Dashboard, Site-to-site and point-to-Site VPN, Virtual Machines, Web Apps, SQL, SharePoint, Storage, Test/Dev environments.

13 opinions »

Improvements to My Organization

Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating Hybrid solutions provides us with greater confidence in higher availability. Storage has made remote access to files much more painless and easy. Using SSO has also been great reducing the number of passwords and locations required to use them.

13 opinions »

Room for Improvement

Pricing is very difficult to guesstimate. With so many ala carte options and individual pricing it can be a hassle to understand. I constantly need to go over the report to find out where I can save money and what is eating up the monthly costs.

13 opinions »

Scalability Issues

Scalability is Microsofts big advantage. At anytime you can add or take away from your servers or services growing them or shrinking them to your needs. You can even automate this process. I personally do not get into Enterprise solutions, but it would appear that the G series is quite scalable.

11 opinions »

Technical Support

I rate technical support 7/10. First response is 2-4 hours. Staff is knowledgeable but can often be difficult to understand. I have also found that a few of them try to e-mail you despite your request for a call. This causes much miscommunication and additional time your problem is not getting resolved. I only give them an 7 because I have struggled a time or two with understanding their English or getting the ball rolling resolving my issue. This all really depends on the department you need. I will say that they always get the issue resolved regardless of the complexity of the problem.

12 opinions »

Previous Solutions

In the past, we used our own solution. We have datacenters where we host our in house solutions. We didn’t completely switch to Azure, but did offload some things to free up hardware for other purposes. We also want to offload hosting to Azure in times of high demand.

9 opinions »

ROI

Microsoft does have special pricing for Development purposes. This does help reduce the monthly costs for our team. I do know the pricing versus other cloud solutions is much higher.

3 opinions »

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

We are MS partners. Depending on your partnership you may or may not get Visual Studio Enterprises licenses. Each license allows you to get a $150 Azure credit per month. This has been great for our developers and I to put in to practice some Azure solutions.

12 opinions »

Microsoft Azure Questions

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager

IT Central Station

Jul 13 2017

Gartner's 2014 Magic Quadrant for IaaS maintains Amazon Web Service at the top of the Leaders quadrant. Do you agree?

Amazon shares the space only with Microsoft Azure cloud, which, though far below AWS, is now a Leader. What are your experiences with Amazon vs. Microsoft in IaaS? Pros and Cons? more »

11 answers

Abhijit ChakrabortyIf we mark closely the Gartner MQ over the last few years, you will notice... more »

Arturo DiazI agree. Amazon has been for a long time the best option for IAAS. But... more »

Paul MorseI have been involved in cloud computing for many years. The question is... more »

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager

IT Central Station

Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became Niche Players: Agree/ Disagree

Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2014 for cloud computing places Amazon and Microsoft as leaders. Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became this year's Niche Players - agree or disagree? more »

4 answers

Karl SchulmeistersI completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless... more »

Tushar Topale ☁ vExpertDISAGREE. VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and... more »

reviewer73665Part of the reason for the change is that Gartner split the Magic Quadrants... more »

Karl Schulmeisters

CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees

Has anyone done oAuth with Azure Active Directory?

I'm curious about anyone's experience implementing oAuth on Azure Active Directory. Its supposedly supported, but we are having difficulties getting it to work stably and my developer has been getting mixed signals from MSFT help desk. more »

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager

IT Central Station

PaaS solutions: Areas for improvement?

If you were in the room with the product manager from Amazon and Microsoft and could give them advice on how to improve their PaaS solutions, what areas for improvement would you suggest? more »

5 answers

Mike BasilI primarily work with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. My... more »

Md. Shams SultanIn adopting Cloud Foundry, the “big aha” included the forecasted 50%... more »

Koustubh SinkarI do not use Microsoft products, so I shall only give suggestions for Amazon.... more »

Microsoft Azure Projects By Members

Check out these projects from our community members.

We changed paper based survey process of Penny

We changed paper based survey process of Penny Market retail company, manage the service from cloud, front-end is... more»

Managed the infrastructure to support National Elections for

Managed the infrastructure to support Portuguese National Elections for the TV Channel - TVI24

Cloud Development Platforms Project

Select cloud development platforms

Building Smart City from the ground up

22 CityLink is a global leader in smart city development and technology. Through their dedication to providing... more»

Construction Business Management Software

Construction Business Management Software. Project is for Nordic market mainly, which helps construction businesses... more»

Stood up Office 365 and DirSync and configured

Stood up Office 365 and DirSync and configured in-house identity management to maintain accounts for ~70K users

Launch a FMCG transactional website in three months

Launch a FMCG transactional website in three months because of a hard stop with old website (black box) server... more»

Cloud Computing Adoption - MVP

Worked creating cloud architecture for Fannie Mae systems including entry and suitability scorecard. Developed... more»

Developed a Governnace SaaS platform

Governance Manager is an enterprise assurance platform which enables executive monitoring and capability insights at... more»

Managed development of world's first complete and comprehensive

Managed development of world's first complete and comprehensive ISO 9001 software meeting 100% requirements of the... more»

Integrate cloud computing solutions to our data center

Integrate cloud computing solutions to our data center.

Last-minute platform to boost sales and data collection

Launched a last-minute platform to deliver marketing boost and data collection in 20 days. Created a platform for... more»

Cloud based backup and infrastructure monitoring

Mobile app & data delivery to 1300 contractors

I managed our firm's engagement to deliver a new mobile application and data via Azure to 1300 contractors with... more»

Microsoft New Zealand Cloud SMB Partner of the Year

Microsoft New Zealand Cloud SMB Partner of the Year 2015

ITaS / IaaS: Working Hard to Have These Services in our Assets

ITaS / IaaS is our goal, with SDDC with VMware, hyper converged (SimpliVity) and QNAP with storage. PyME´s are our... more»

Designed and Established the technological considerations for implementing

Designed and Established the technological considerations for implementing a solution that was based on cloud... more»

Microsoft Azure Consultants

Request a call with one of our top consultants and experts in Microsoft Azure. (Add me to this list.)

Points

SrEngineer672

Consultant

Reviewed vSphere: Cost effective and best solution available....

Points

GregSchulz

Server and StorageIO Group (Storage IO): Independent IT Advisor, Author, Blogger and Consultant

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: This product has facilitated development, testing,...

Points

VincentLukken

Principal Consultant

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: A humongous amount of features are available. It is...

Points

Mark Arteaga

CEO

Mark Arteaga specializes in helping customers implement enterprise and consumer facing software solutions. Mark has an extensive background in software development and has dedicating the last 10 plus years to the trade delivering solutions to customers such as Microsoft, Bell Media (formerly... more>>

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: Top Reasons Developers Should Use Windows Azure...

Points

Uriel Maimon

Owner

If it wasnt my job it would have been my hobby - lucky me ;-) CONSULTING/PROJECT MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE: 15+ years work experience Professional Services / Consulting Project Management R&D Management/Supervision Coaching/Mentor Uriel Maimon is a Director at bsmArt Consulting with... more>>

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: Implementation is simple but anything to do with...