Azure Stack Reviews

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.

The most valuable features are that it is a Hybrid, and we can easily integrate with the Microsoft Public Cloud.

It is totally CSA compliant. 

It's secure. It's not open. Anything we need to do has to be validated by the OEM, and software vendor.

It's an engineered system. everything that needs to be done such as a dispatching order when there is a new feature has to be completed by the vendors. It's totally dependent upon the vendor.

We need an expressway from a different network to allow for connectivity purposes. For example, If we want to have remote storage on-premises or off-site, I have to go through the public cloud. That is the only way.

There is a dependency. They don't encourage having it on-premises in different networks. 

I have an HCI model hyper-converged infrastructure. It's a minimum of four nodes with Microsoft Azure and I want to attach additional storage, but I cannot attach it without connecting directly and finding a new network.

There are limits to the bandwidth and sizing of the images.

Kubernetes as a service is there, but not as a platform as a service. I would like to have a Kubernetes cluster in a PaaS. They have it in the Azure public cloud, but they haven't released it in the Azure Stack.

I have been using Azure Stack for one year.

It's a stable product.

Azure Stack is scalable. You can add it immediately.

We have a cloud operator, we have our own provisioning team, cloud engineers, cloud architects, cloud evangelist, and cloud developers who use this solution.

I had contact with technical support once. There was a miscommunication between the hardware vendor and Microsoft OneNote. 

It took 20 to 25 days to get it back up and running. OneNote failed and Microsoft had an update without coordinating with the Microsoft engineer. There was a lack of communication.

Overall, the support is good.

Previously we used other solutions but we didn't want to use third-party outsourced companies. We have our own infrastructure.

The initial setup was easy, I didn't find it to be complex. Because it's validated hardware and software, any patches that have been released are validated by Microsoft itself.

Azure Stack is expensive.

In the Middle East, we deal with a company called Logicom that Microsoft promoted and suggested to us. We are customers of Logicom and Logicom has a relationship with Microsoft.

I don't see any levels of risk involved unless there are different levels of risk that I am not aware of.

We have concepts called foil domain, availability domain, and geo-location. If you have this large domain in one rack and it is hyper-converged, and if one rack goes down then it's gone. You have to invest more money to get another rack to distribute the load amongst the two and make it high availability.

The more that you invest the more availability you get.

If you have applications running in a Microsoft-oriented platform then you have to be very clever, especially with architecture and design. It depends on your requirements. 

It's an expensive solution and even if you don't have the instances up and running, you are having to pay for the storage.

If the company is established with good returns and they are looking for a secure, safe, and reliable system, Azure Stack is a good choice.

Cost matters, no one wants to pay for virtualization. It is now available for free with the OS.

Assessing cost and reliability, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are a solution provider and we provide cloud service to our customers using Azure Stack. Some of the services that they use are Microsoft Intune, Azure Active Directory, and Azure Storage.

The user interface is nice and very simple to use. 

Azure provides a great deal of flexibility.

The user experience could be improved to make it more comfortable.

My company has been dealing with this solution for the past two years.

We have had no complaints with respect to stability.

Our customers are satisfied with the scalability of Azure Stack.

The technical support is good.

I have experience with AWS and I would have to say that it is more comfortable to use than Azure.

It's not complex at all. Based on the customer's requirements, we implement the solution. The deployment usually takes approximately 15 days.

In terms of costs, it is a standard price, and there is no negotiation.

My company is not very involved in the cloud, but Azure Stack is a product that we recommend depending on the customer. If their budget and requirements are appropriate, and they want the flexibility that this solution offers, then we can implement it.

I do not have experience with all of the products on the market, but from my perspective, Azure Stack is a good one.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and the Azure Stack is one of the technologies that we use to provide services to our customers.

Need more time

The most valuable feature is IaaS. I find it to be good.

Third-party dashboards are supported in the PaaS.

The rapid provisioning is good.

They have VPN connectivity, which promotes encapsulation.

In PaaS Model, they are only offering MS SQL as a service, web applications as a service, and containers as a service. When it comes to containers, I could not find how to use the functionality. Recently, one of our customers wanted to have Sybase as the database for their SAP applications, but it was not in the Azure Stack Marketplace.

It is closed and It doesn't allow you to customize networks or any new features.

Better flexibility in the network is needed.

I have been using Azure Stack for one year.

It's a cloud concept, so we expect stability but it's broad scoping with IT. I have been working in the field for the last 18 years and stability is affected by new technologies. We are told that new systems are quite stable, but we are still struggling to provide a service that is a reliable one. This is because of the different complicated scenarios, demands, and requirements from the end-user.

The cloud is challenging and from a stability point of view, it depends on what services you are running inside and what scalability you are providing to the end-user.

Good

The technical support is okay. There is a technical support gateway and Microsoft is working in the background. There is some kind of coordination between engineers from Microsoft and Dell, because one time when we had an upgrade, the people from Dell upgraded it without coordination from Microsoft.

Azure Stack is a closed box, but it is compliant. It doesn't permit you to customize the network or the features. You have to take what Microsoft is offering and just simply obey it.

We are using a connected model, as opposed to a disconnected model.

The pricing is very expensive. If I were rating it on cost then it would be a five out of ten.

In general, it provides the flexibility for configuration for bigger teams. 

They can provide more integration with other services, such as
components, open source, because I use these services.

I have been using Azure Stack for five years. I use it on a daily basis.

Around 10 architects, engineers, and developers in my company use this solution.

It is a stable solution.

It is easy to scale.

Everything is okay in terms of technical support. We have support from our side. For some minor stuff, we need to get back to the vendor. 

The initial setup was simple. It took a few hours.

It was done by my company. 

It is in the medium range cost-wise. For each component, I sort of buy licensing. Each component has its licensing fee by the number of users or by size.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Azure Stack an eight out of ten. 

We are a solution provider and Azure Stack is one of the products that we implement for our clients. One of our clients is using it as an IaaS, where they have control over the infrastructure.

As we learn more about this product, security-wise, and about the tools that are available, we can apply this to what our customers are looking for.

The most valuable features are the control and flexibility that we have, where we can build our own solutions from scratch.

Azure Stack integrates well with other tools.

There are documentation and tools available for use, and they are good.

One of the problems is that systems still have to be developed and as things move forward, we have to build a lot of our Azure Stack solutions from scratch. It does not give you a complete, production-ready setup.

We are still exploring Azure Stack and are in the requirement gathering phase.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

The initial setup is not complex.

We have an in-house team for deployment. We have different internal teams and generally do not rely on third-party vendors.

We are satisfied with the pricing.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first look at the people within the community. They have provided details about their experience and it's a good place to start understanding and analyzing, before beginning the implementation. It will give you an idea as to costs, as well as how to integrate with your environment.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I am using the Azure Stack for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Basically, I use the OCR from Microsoft, which is the reason for using Azure.

The most valuable feature is the OCR, which I use for reading PDFs.

The price of the OCR could be more competitive with Google.

I have been using the Azure stack for about four months.

I have had no issues with stability.

My rating for scalability would be an eight out of ten. I just have not used it long enough to rate it higher than that.

I have not yet needed to contact technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I did not need help with deployment and we have an in-house team for maintenance.

The price of using Azure Stack for OCR is more expensive than using OCR by Google.

I have tested many different OCRs, including one from Google Cloud, and this is one of the best that I have ever seen.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to start small. As you gain experience and confidence with the platform, you can expand to larger tasks.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.