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CloudSphere vs Microsoft Azure comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CloudSphere
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (13th), Cloud Management (30th)
Microsoft Azure
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
316
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (1st), PaaS Clouds (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

CloudSphere and Microsoft Azure aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. CloudSphere is designed for Cloud Migration and holds a mindshare of 1.8%, up 0.9% compared to last year.
Microsoft Azure, on the other hand, focuses on Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS), holds 17.3% mindshare, down 18.2% since last year.
Cloud Migration
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Vibhor Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Great discovery, good support, and generally reliable
The area they need to focus most on is the capability of assessment and the landing zones. It’s lacking right now. Cloud transformation has four to five cases, including planning, discovery, assessment, and the MVC, which is called the minimal viable cloud. That comes with the architecture design or landing zone creation, where we will create resources on the cloud which we are provisioning. If we are moving onto the cloud platform, AWS, or zero GCP, we need an account. We need resources to be able to compute the network. Most organizations have their landing zone process and know how to create the resources account, compute the network layer and the security layer. However, this landing zone creation is not there in CloudSphere as a feature. It cannot create any of the cloud providers' accounts or their network security computing as a part of the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is missing in this product. It will not discover all the applications, although they also have the catalog. They are constantly announcing their catalog to identify applications based on the service which we are discovering. 50% of the time, the application will discover automatically. However, for the other 50%, we need to find the application based on its running process. That's the automation method that we need to follow and that they call blueprint. We need to create those blueprints and then we need to tag those applications. That is the one process that takes time when we do the discovery. One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running. It will not discover SAP or some kinds of applications that are running on those inside the application of the servers as well. When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera. We cannot scan the 1,000 servers together. That causes it to take time. There’s a graph missing. It shows where all the servers have interdependencies; however, when we do actual work, it will not work properly in terms of what we present to the customer.
SubodhThakar - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates various functionalities and have good documentation but have high pricing
Cosmos DB offered better scalability. In Azure SQL, we had to carefully manage the storage tier, switching back and forth based on needs. But when we first implemented Cosmos DB, we had a good understanding of the required data volume over the past three months. This helped us select the appropriate tier because we had those figures. If we had done it the other way around, it would have been much harder to estimate the data accurately. While you can get a rough idea, whether it works out in practice is more of a hit-and-miss approach, which we have already experienced with Cosmos DB. We applied the knowledge gained from that exercise to build a similar solution over Azure SQL. On the DevOps side, our team consisted of five members, ranging from senior to junior roles. We would raise requests for specific services needed in the development environment. The process typically takes three to five business days, including all necessary approvals, from submitting the request to receiving the resources and verifying access.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources."
"For the customers I work with, it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access."
"We do not need to install any appliances or any agents."
"When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved. There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere. What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere."
"Provides multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers."
"The tool’s stability is good."
"Feature-wise, I like its stability. Also, it is easy to access the solution and its options."
"Some features of Azure are very important for us. You can control access for your company, it's not complicated managing the solution either. I think the solution is very stable, secure and the documentation Microsoft has on their website is complete. You can use it to find the solution's problems or implement solutions."
"I have found the solution to be flexible, easy to use, and the documents are straightforward to understand."
"The solution is completely scalable."
"It is quick and easy to deploy. It is flexible, and we can deploy a resource anytime. We like and prefer the pay-as-you-go model."
"The cycle development time is pretty fast, and there's very good coupling within the whole set of Microsoft tools, from database to the ETL engine, ingestion through Azure Data Factory, then modeling Synapse Analytics, and reporting through Power BI."
"The product has been quite stable."
 

Cons

"The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs."
"There are quite a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere."
"When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera."
"The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data."
"The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies."
"The solution lacks fluidity and is not intuitive."
"Ease of use could be improved."
"The cost calculation for the services can be an unclear aspect which makes it difficult to estimate the expenses incurred accurately."
"There is room for improvement in the product's AI capabilities and real-time data processing features."
"Microsoft Azure could improve by being more user-friendly and the interface could be better."
"The integration pipeline could be a bit more broad in terms of applications."
"Sometimes performance takes a hit on a slow network."
"At this point, the latency is too high to use Azure in our production environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."
"It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options."
"The pricing is fine."
"There are no licensing fees."
"Customers pay for our software and use our solution as a service through monthly payments. They don't pay the licensing fee directly to Microsoft."
"The product is expensive."
"Software licensing models can be expensive depending on what you need compared to open source solutions, for example. However, if you don't have the technical skills, you may be better off paying for a license and support instead of trying to use open source solutions."
"The pricing of Microsoft Azure is not very flexible."
"Several thousand dollars and counting, we haven't needed to upgrade on premises hardware (In fact we eliminated all of the old on-premises hardware and run 100% on Azure) or pay for it's maintenance, power etc."
"The long-term cost is higher than if you set up the servers on-premises, which is something that could be improved through more competitive pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CloudSphere?
The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources.
What is your primary use case for CloudSphere?
I use the solution for our hyper-converged infrastructure within the organization for hospital management. We also access some of the integrated Active Directory and other integrated services relat...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudSphere?
We have a FortiGate license. The product is very good. The technical support is also very good. If the solution provides a single console to manage everything, it would be more convenient and power...
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

HyperCloud
Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Affymetrix, Bell Helicopter, Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, Porterville Unified School District, Interact for Health, VirtueCom, Warren Memorial Hospital, Front Porch, RMH Group, Meyers Nave, Intraworks, Information Technology, ETTE, Clackamas Community College
BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
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861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.