Microsoft Azure Reviews

I primarily used the solution for hypothetical cases. I used the solution to look at the 2019 active directory environment, some remote SQL storage, and storage access from on-premises to the cloud.

There's a feature for automated tasks. As an administrator, handling administrative-type tasks, it's quite useful. For example, I was spending lots of money when I would spin things up. I'd spin up a SQL server. I'd spin up different types of things. They cost a lot of money. I would get distracted, walk away, and go to bed. I'd get up in the morning, and I'd see I'd have a bill. Therefore, I spun up an automated task and wrote a PowerShell script, put it in an automated task, and it would run at seven o'clock every night, and delete all my resources. It saved me money.

You can build an environment in minutes. It's very good in terms of being an infrastructure as a service, and I found that really fascinating.

All the devices they have up there that replace existing devices in the real world like load balancers or F5 are helpful. I'm not sure how they relate or how they form compared to F5, or the firewalls compare to the ones that are in data centers, however, they looked all right to me.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales extremely well.

It's a bit of a mystery how the storage is going to perform. For example, when you've got a storage device like Hitachi or NetApp, you can run reports on that storage and you can do all this good stuff. I'm not sure if that's the case with Azure. A lot of the stuff is kind of proprietary, at the moment.

The cost is quite high.

You can't control the data as much as you would like to. When it's theirs, it's theirs. With Hitachi, Hitachi has its own policies. You can move data around based on how much it's used into lower-cost discs and whatnot. You might be able to do that with Azure. However, I can't verify that.

The initial setup is complex.

They need to make storage easy and offer more interconnectivity between solutions.

I've used the solution for about a year or so. Maybe a year and a half at most. It hasn't been that long.

In terms of stability, I've seen it go down twice now. They've had two problems with the active directory. That said, I would describe it as stable. They have different sites, regions, and whatnot, where you can move your data around in case you lose a data center or you lose a region. However, if you lose the active directory, that can take everything down.

It's not any more stable than an enterprise environment, to be honest. Maybe a little bit, however, if you lose a network connection to it, that's not stable.

I worked in a bank, a huge 50,000 employee enterprise. I saw their infrastructure go up and down about the same, once or twice a year. That's about the same as Azure, therefore, it's not anything different than an enterprise. You can make an enterprise resilient if you have lots of domain controllers and you do lots of redundant paths. 

The solution is very scalable. It's one of its great selling points. If a company needs to scale, it can do so with ease.

I've never been in touch with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

For a layperson or someone who is not trained, it wasn't an easy initial setup. It had some complexities.

I've personally gotten used to the process. The deployment, for example, wouldn't take that long now. While in the beginning, a deployment might take a month, now that I am more comfortable with the solution and more familiar, I can likely do it in a few days. 

That said, it depends on a company's plans and its own unique environment and complexities. It can vary. Most people seem to struggle with all of the connections they had before.

The number of people you need to deploy or maintain the solution really depends on the size of the environment. After implementation, you could probably scale back your employees from 10% to 50% with Azure.

I can handle an implementation myself. I'm getting better and faster at it.

I've found the cost to be a bit high. You also get dinged for extra things along the way.

The charges are also unpredictable. Even if you think something is a relatively static item, they'll charge you for it and it will change your expectation of the cost.

I've looked at other solutions, such as Hitachi and Netapp.

The biggest struggle a person would have these days, as an architect, is to determine what the cost-benefit of going to Azure would be rather than going to a storage device such as a Hitachi or a NetApp. Which has better value? What's going to be better in the next couple of years? You can really get screwed if you're going to be pulling data down from the cloud. If you pull a lot of data from the cloud, it's going to cost you. You don't get charged for putting it up. You get charged for pulling it down.

I basically used the solution to study.

I used a few different deployment models. I made an on-prem environment, Hyper-V environment, on my laptop and I connected it to the cloud.

I'd advise those considering the solution to not put all of their eggs in one basket. By that, I mean, it's a good idea to go hybrid and not full cloud. Going hybrid covers that network loss that you could suffer if you lose the network. If you lost a data center or a region, you could still have your on-prem server running an image of the cloud onsite.

I'd give the solution an eight out of ten. I haven't had a chance to study AWS or Google, however, I like this solution very much.

One of the use cases that we have is with our installation of SAP on private. We also have some apps that we have developed that are public, and we use the security system that they provide. We also use Microsoft Sentinel, which is the SIEM that helps us to align with the alerts and the incidents. We have a combination of public and private clouds, but everything is in Azure.

Its ability to scale is most valuable. There are certain periods of the year when we are busier, and we're able to scale up and scale down with Azure depending upon our needs.

They're already doing quite a bit. I'm not unsatisfied with anything that they're doing right now. They can maybe make the transitions a little smoother and improve its pricing. The pricing for the end-user packages is a bit high.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. It is very simple to scale.

You have to go through a lot of preliminary levels before you finally get to someone, but you can get a difficult problem solved. There is a process that you have to follow.

As far as the setup goes, most of it is pretty simple. When we started working with Microsoft Intune and a little bit on the unified labeling, it became a bit more complicated, but we're getting through it.

Shared active directory and multifactor authentication (MFA) are a little bit difficult to introduce because once you put something on it, it affects all of their Office products and anything that deals with Microsoft, whether it is SharePoint, OneDrive, or something else. Often, we want to activate it for an app and not so much for everything else, but that's our peculiar quirk. I don't think there is anything that Microsoft needs to change necessarily.

The pricing for the end-user packages is a bit high. It is full of very interesting services, but I would still like it to be less expensive.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

The solution is mainly used for setting up a big data platform on Azure and using some Azure items to navigate the data links and Data Factory.

The solution is quite flexible.

The product has been very stable for us so far.

You can scale the solution if you need to.

The solution needs to be easier to configure in the future. Right now, it's a bit difficult to accomplish.

Technical support could be better. They need to be more responsive.

The documentation should be more accessible. It's hard to find what we need right now.

It would be helpful if there was more data science or AI implemented in future versions.

The product needs to implement more API capabilities.

I've had about two years of experience using this solution.

We've found the stability to be quite good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We can scale the solution well. If a company wants to scale the solution, they can do so pretty easily.

We have about 20-50 people on the solution currently. We do plan to continue to use it in the future.

I've been in touch with technical support and I haven't found them to be overly helpful. They need to improve their support services. The answers take too long to get. We shouldn't have to wait for as long as we do. I'd say, at this point, we aren't exactly satisfied with the level of service they provide to their clients.

We previously used AWS. We simply used it for benchmarking.

I can't speak to the initial setup as I didn't have any experience with it. I wasn't part of the implementation process.

I did mage the Azure DevOps deployment.

We're just a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

I'd recommend the solution for larger clients, especially if they are based in Europe or America.

In general, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this product at a seven. It's been mostly good for us. However, it could use much better technical support and documentation to make things easier.

We are going to use Microsoft Azure to move some on-premise servers into the cloud so that our data can be held there.

We are now trying to decide exactly this. Where can it improve our daily business?

Microsoft Azure can be pretty advanced and difficult to understand. I would like it to be simplified. The licensing especially needs to be simplified.

We have not been using Microsoft Azure for very long, about three months. My company has asked me to look for a better solution in terms of security perspective. They have asked me to technically go through to see if there is a real need to change or not, and what the new features are.

The stability of Microsoft Azure has been very good from what we have seen.

I have not actually gone through the initial setup yet. So I am trying to figure that out. They want me to go through the training so I can understand the setup.

So far we are satisfied with the pricing of Microsoft Azure.

We are also looking into other platforms. Perhaps an open-source platform.

I would rate Microsoft Azure at an eight out of a scale of ten.

We host various sites and utilize this solution for purchasing domains as well. It's simple to host small sites and back-end software applications on Azure instead of on regional servers

It has great deals of APIs for automation that we can utilize for managing our services. We implemented some custom tools that were developed in house and are extremely happy with the time that we now spend monitoring the websites.

Azure has the best website amongst all cloud computing platforms. It is simple to utilize, and one can release nearly anything, from app services to host sites.

Being a big item, it has it's own share of bugs. I had a great deal of difficulty establishing the account at first.

No

No

We are at 150% at this time, not considering the time that we concentrated on something else.

Yes, we searched Google and Amazon.

By migrating our infrastructure to Azure, we have been more agile on several fronts as an organization, from been able to create proof of concepts on the fly, to being able to make changes quickly and repeatedly.

• 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 Identity (Azure Active Directory): This feature adds multi-factor authentication, self-service password reset and group-based application access.

• Storage (Azure files): Still in preview at this stage, its allows the creating of SMB 2.1 shared folders on Azure storage service.

• Azure Site Recovery: Allows the replication and recovery of VMs hosted on Azure, thereby extending business values of almost any size.

• Networking (Azure ExpressRoute): This feature allows the connection of data center with Azure via private link that does not travel over the internet. Advantages include security, lower latency and higher reliability.

Every area of the product still needs to improve as it can always get better. Windows wasn't where it is today decades ago. There was a continuous improvement and evolutionary changes. Same is expected of Microsoft Azure.

Specifically, I would like to see better Azure Data Analytics and monitoring RF.

Azure is very stable with no issues at all.

The ability to scale easily is one of Microsoft Azure strength, one can start and scale up as traffic increase or as the business growth is required. So we didn't have issues with scalability.

The technical support is great.

We never used a different solution. We had a PoC with every vendor in the same competitive space and decided to go with the best.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as we knew what is required from the technical perspective and as a business. Which we specified in an architectural design before hand.

Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support.

We evaluated some other competitive products and decided to go with Azure as its suit and meet our business requirement.

You need to have a clear vision of your business expectation from the product. Define your business requirements, objectives and ensure that your cloud provider can support those requirements.

Consider the cost, location, licensing, and technical capability to support and guide your organization.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the limitless possibilities of the infrastructure. 

The documentation is out of date. It needs to be improved and modernized. 

Technical support needs improvement. 

I would like to see more flexibility surrounding what framework you can use for machine learning model creation.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. it's reliable and the performance is good. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales well. A company can expand it as necessary.

We have around 100 consultants using the solution. 

They do not seem to have enough technical support staff. Sometimes you have to contact them using email. You get the answer maybe three weeks after that email. It's available, however, it's not enough, and it's not very fast.

In terms of the initial implementation, how difficult or easy it is depends on the services. The most common deployments are pretty clear and it's pretty simple, however, in some cases, it's very difficult.

The deployments can be fast. For the simplest ones, five minutes is enough. However, sometimes when you are trying to use a specific service, for example, the cloud solution, it could take days or weeks just to get it available.

We have had a partner support us with the implementation. 

We pay a licensing fee on a yearly basis. I don't have details in terms of the exact costs. Sometimes there are extra costs here and there. 

We're a partner.

Inside the cloud, I have experience using different kinds of products like databases products virtual machines, etc.

I'd advise new users to prepare for certification. The most basic one is fine. Companies should preview the solution before they start any project.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.