Azure Stack Reviews

I recommend Azure Stack 100% for hybrid cases, dev & test, banking, financial (banking, insurance) , healthcare, public sector.

Also, The assessments include the following standards:

•PCI-DSS addresses the payment card industry.

•CSA Cloud Control Matrix is a comprehensive mapping across multiple standards, including FedRAMP Moderate, ISO27001, HIPAA, HITRUST, ITAR, NIST SP800-53, and others.

•FedRAMP High for government customers.

The compliance documentation can be found on the Microsoft Service Trust Portal. The compliance guides are a protected resource and require you to sign in with your Azure cloud service credentials.

The main pillars, on which Binbox is now developing, are Cloud Solutions (public, private and hybrid Cloud) using Azure and our DataCenters (built on state-of-the-art technology), Microsoft 365 and Binbox Managed Services (including 24/7/365 support). These being said, the Azure stack has come to complete our service portfolio like a glove.

The most valuable features that make Azure Stack different are low latency (<9 ms, high performance), data sovereignty, cloud readiness, public Azure features in the private cloud. Considering all the features, the quality of service / price ratio is superior compared to any cloud option.

It would be great when Microsoft will enable WDI, AI and Cognitive Services in Azure Stack.

Binbox Global Services has been using Azure Stack since 2018 when we deployed the first Azure Stack in Central and Eastern Europe. We were the second Microsoft partener that deployed an Azure Stack in Europe.

Now we have 7+ Azure Stacks and other Azure Stacks dedicated to Public Sector.

Azure Stack is stable. 

Azure Stack Hub provides on-demand, scalable computing resources.

The initial setup was a little complicated but not too much. 

We went through both a private vendor and Microsoft. The private vendor handled one part of the deployment; a Microsoft team did another. They both taught us how to manage Azure Stack. We have a large team of technical engineers who received Azure Stack certification. They know Azure Stack very well. Overall, it was not hard for us to deploy. 

We use Azure Stack for migration, application modernization, and cloud-native modernization.

Azure Stack's pricing could be improved.

I have been working with Azure Stack for around four to five years.

I rate Azure Stack a nine out of ten for stability.

Azure Stack is a very scalable solution.

I rate Azure Stack ten out of ten for scalability.

Azure Stack’s initial setup is easy.

Azure Stack is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I would recommend Azure Stack to other users.

Overall, I rate Azure Stack a nine and a half out of ten.

We are providing solutions based on Azure Stack to customers. It has the same interface as Microsoft Azure in a local context.

The admin dashboard is the main feature of the solution. Different services are running on it.

Azure Stack doesn't have all the services available in Microsoft Azure. It would be useful if Azure Stack could be developed to be like Microsoft Azure with all the services. Although Microsoft manages it, not all of Microsoft Azure’s services are available on Azure Stack. 

When we try to build a solution on Azure Stack, there are some limitations with the services available, most of which are available on Microsoft Azure. Adding more services to Azure Stack will be beneficial for customers. The product doesn’t have a DR solution available locally. The product does not support a local DR either.

I have been using the solution for three years.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

We are getting support through a local partner.

Neutral

I rate the ease of initial setup a four out of ten.

The deployment process took a few weeks. We needed two to three people to deploy the solution. It's an engineered system that comes with everything loaded. Microsoft’s team handles configurations. We only had to handle the equipment and manage it locally.

Pricing depends on the solutions which we build on. IaaS’s pricing is high. Other services might be competitive.

I am using the latest version of the product. Azure Stack is an on-premise solution that gives cloud services to customers. We give it as a cloud service to customers. Although it is a fully managed solution from Microsoft, it has limitations. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.

Currently, we are just using it to plan for our proof of concept and internal testing, not for production.

I've been using Azure Stack for more than a year.

It's not stable as IBM solutions. It fully supports all the .NET solutions, but our main applications are based in Java. So in those cases, we've had some minor problems with Azure, but Microsoft always says that it can handle this stuff.

Microsoft's support isn't as good as IBM's. They are fast, but they aren't knowledgeable enough.

Setting up Azure Stack isn't as straightforward as IBM's Cloud Pack for Apps. IBM's solution uses OpenShift implementation, so it's fully automated, whereas the Microsoft solution has some hardware issues, so we had to some manual configurations. The total time for deployment was around one week, I guess.

I believe our license is yearly.

I would rate Azure six out of 10. I don't have a lot of opinions on it yet, but when we start using it in production, then I'll have a better idea.

When we engage Azure Stack, it's very easy to lift and shift. That's why we've been successful because we can be clear and fast in understanding workflows from the customer.  

The most valuable feature is the clear and user-friendly interface.

Azure Stack could be improved with more integration, governance tools, monitor tools, and lift and shift tools. We also have problems with the capacity usage. In the next release, Azure should include a tool to manage the journey during the lift and shift process and identify where integration is needed.

I've been using Azure Stack for four to five years.

Azure Stack is stable.

The setup and integration are straightforward.

The premium version is too costly.

For those thinking about implementing Azure Stack, it's important to understand the customer's workflow and whether you're talking about IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. I would rate Azure Stack as five out of ten.

We use Azure Stack primarily for hosting customer applications .NET applications. We use mainly App Service, Blob Storage, and Cognitive Services. 

We develop applications on the Microsoft platform, infrastructure, and servers. Our servers are Windows, and we use the .NET framework and C# programming language. Everything is easier in Azure.

Azure Stack integrates well with Microsoft. It's also good for transitioning from an on-premise or hybrid setup to the cloud. It's seamless. 

Microsoft is changing the Azure Stack interface all the time, so it's sometimes hard to find the functionality or the service you're looking for. A feature was in one place and now it has moved somewhere else. 

It's because the product is quickly evolving, so they're changing constantly. I understand, but it's difficult to find things when we don't use Azure every day. It's not a big issue.

We've been using Azure Stack for seven or eight years.

Azure Stack is highly stable.

We have had a good experience with scalability. Azure Stack's replication is well-written. It's flexible. For example, you can scale it differently on workdays and weekends to reduce operating costs. We automatically reduce the sizing of the solution. We stop some services like VMs on the weekends if we can. Scaling up and stopping resources is automated based on a set schedule. This is useful.

Microsoft support is very good.

We switched from AWS to Azure. The main issues were costs and some bad experiences with temporary disks. This was a long time ago, so I cannot say if AWS is currently better or worse than Azure.

Azure Stack is also in the cloud, so it's easy. We also use the Internet Information Server. If you use the node server, it's going to be local and based on the technology you're using. We can choose between one or the other.

For example, we use Mongo Atlas service on Azure and on-premises. Both use the MongoDB Atlas service. It is architecture bound, so you have the choice of going through Azure or the on-premise solution because both have advantages.

Azure is relatively expensive, but on the other hand, you get excellent support, stability, and security, so I think it's worth it. 

I rate Azure Stack nine out of 10. It is a great tool if the technology you use is a Microsoft-based stack because Azure is Microsoft's cloud provider. 

We're getting more serious with Office 365 now. We start from the mailbox, the mail server exchange, and then we also have SharePoint. We have migrated all the local network drives, shared drives, home drives, to Office 365 SharePoint. We have been making use of the document library for sharing, and this year, we've started to use more of Microsoft Teams as a kind of collaboration, for online meetings within the organization and also to communicate with our students. Microsoft Teams is not the only software that we use, we also use Zoom for class meetings, and then Microsoft Teams for team meetings, really.

As an education provider, we have many students — over a thousand students actually; they are also the users of this domain. We also have 250 permanent and casual staff, it's quite a big number.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

At this stage, we are quite pleased with Office 365 Azure. To me, Azure offers a pathway for dealing with the active directory, and for storing all our Office 365 information assets.

Technical support is quick and responsive. I find that whenever I encounter an error (sometimes it's really the system errors or something that I didn't know how to do), the customer support is quite helpful. We get good support from Microsoft in terms of Office 365.

Take today, for example, we have a worldwide issue (maybe just Australia), and our Office 365 cloud authentication components were down for almost an hour. Thankfully, customer support helped us rectify that problem very quickly.

A consultant helped us with the implementation back in 2018.

I would only recommend this solution to smaller organizations like ours because I cannot really speculate what big issues that the bigger organizations will face. For a small or medium-sized college, it's quite good — I can't see any negative sides. In particular, our staff and students don't really use our computers. That means they are bringing their own devices and using their own computers. Because of Office 365, they don't need to come here (to campus) and they don't need to connect to any kind of VPN in order to access their emails or order their course materials or even the information that we provide on the internet, for that matter. Everything is on the cloud.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten — strictly because I have nothing to compare it to.

Not sure

move to cloud - improved by no need to maintain hardware

We've had a lot of issues with the solution as of late. We aren't very happy with it right now.

The stability is okay.

You can scale the solution if you need to.

We started to get issues in May of this year.  We didn't know that the one side of Azure was not fully migrated. There's two Azure on-premise solutions in our organization.

I needed to migrate everything that wasn't migrated over quickly. I needed someone who was knowledgable to assist to get it done. Therefore, I asked Windows and was looking into our budget.

We told them to go ahead and do it, and that we had two thus far, one for memory, one for CPU, and that's all. I only wanted two point areas. I wanted my Azure to point to only one, however, now it's set up to point to two point areas, which is not what we want.

The solution is not user friendly. I'd prefer to move over to AWS, which is much easier in this sense.

The product could improve its manageability.

I've been using the solution for a while, however, we started having issues with the solution in May of 2020.

The stability is okay, however, there are a few glitches here and there. 

The scalability is okay. However, AWS is easier to scale. With AWS, you don't have to update your CPU and RAM. Everything's done for you.

In terms of technical support, it's very bad. We don't have a guy who is good at helping us, in our company, so we have to rely on the Shanghai team. The one person who supports us is in Shanghai.

We are relying on Shanghai technical support to help to create dashboards or whatever we need. Moving forward, we need a good technical guy in-house to help us. I cannot rely on Shanghai every time. 

Shanghai also seems to have two teams, however, I don't understand why. There's no direct number to the right people you have to reach, and the customer team we find to be quite bad. We're not overly satisfied with the level of service we've been provided so far.

The initial setup wasn't as easy as AWS, which has a much simpler deployment.

We ran into issues in terms of migration. Not everything was fully migrated, originally, and that caused us a lot of problems. It's still not quite set up how I would like it to be.

I've looked into AWS, which is more user friendly, and is a solution I would prefer to move over to. Not only is it always easier for us too manage by another provision, it's a lot faster. Azure is slower. 

Honestly, if I were to compare the two, I'd say that AWS is much better. It's so much easier to deal with and easier to understand. It's also easier to deploy and has a shorter learning curve overall. On top of that, AWS provides 20% of the traffic to the site. You don't need to update your processor for CPU and RAM. They do all of that for free. There's just way more up-sides to AWS than Azure, unfortunately.

Azure is just average. I'd rate it five out of ten. As an end-user, I find it far too difficult to manage, and it's not really worth the effort, especially when there are other solutions that make it so much easier.