Microsoft Azure Reviews

Our whole data center is on this basically. We are UK Export Finance, so we've got financial products there. All of our servers are hosted in Azure.

We are using an Azure subscription. We are on Azure Public Cloud, but we have got our own private subscription.

We've got multiple tools on Azure, which is a very good feature of Azure. Our Palo Alto firewall and other things are hosted in Azure. We're using Sentinel as well, which is a security tool that is being used by our SOC teams.

I've also used AWS, and I find Azure to be more Windows-driven. Although Azure is newer as compared to AWS, it is growing fast. Microsoft is working towards the betterment of Azure.

As compared to AWS, Azure can improve its functionality. In terms of the feature list, it is still lacking a bit as compared to AWS. AWS supports lots of types of operating systems, which Azure is still catching up with. Azure is mainly focused on the Windows system, and it is not yet there in terms of integration with other operating systems like Linux, Unix. Azure is slowly catching up.

I've been working with Azure for the last five years.

Lots of glitches are still there. Microsoft is constantly working to resolve those. It is a new product as compared to AWS, so, obviously, it would have some glitches. Three years ago, it was full of bugs. It is much better and stable now.

It is scalable. We've got around 450 users.

Their technical support is very good. Their response is very good. At the end of the day, we're a business, and their business support is pretty good.

The setup is quite straightforward. It is not at all hard.

We've got a third-party maintenance company that actually maintains our Azure space. 

It is not cheap. Its price could be a little bit less.

It is a cloud solution at the end of the day. People can pick up any cloud solution, but Azure is renowned. Azure and AWS are the main competitors in the cloud market now. AWS comes first, and Azure comes after that. If your solution is predominantly in the Linux space, you should go for AWS. If you are primarily Windows-based, you should go for Azure.

I would rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

We have been using Azure for DevOps and non-production environments. It is great when you want to deploy apps in your staging environment first using deployment slots. This allows you to flick the switch very quickly between your current prod app and the newly developed in staging to see how it behaves in the real world. If something goes wrong, you can easily switch it back.

Azure is a platform which allows our organization to be agile. It very quickly provisions servers, infrastructure, and apps on the fly and complies with security requirements and data safety.

Azure Active Directory, Azure VMs, Azure network security groups (NSG), and  monitoring endpoints across different regions to check how your platform operates from different geographic locations. Azure backups are another feature which are quite useful, especially since they allow us to backup our Azure VMs and our on-premise servers. Data can be backed up to Azure, saving time, space, and using clunky tapes to restore data, when needed.

Azure ARM console can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning. 

If you are not aware of costs, pricing, etc., you can end up with a hefty bill. However, I found that the Azure price calculator is a valuable tool to use before starting to deploy VMs in Azure. This tool will give you an overview of the costs you should expect on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

I have had no stability issues. It is a very stable platform and very resilient. It comes down how you set up your geo-redundant options for backups, SQL replication. and VMs which run your services/apps.

I have had no scalability issues. It is an elastic platform. It all depends how you set up your scale up options to address heavy loads, but the options are there for you to use.

Microsoft Premier support is great to deal with. They understand very quickly the scenarios and how critical a scenario can be. They provide info, support, and knowledge to address issues. 

We did not have a particular issue when implementing. It was mostly understanding all the options Azure had. We used Premier support to generate inquiries with Microsoft seeking clarification about what option was best suited for what we wanted to do.

I used AWS (Amazon Web Services), but mostly because I was involved in a project. AWS is also a great solution, but I found Azure was easier to use and it had a native integration with my current platform (Windows).

The key here is design. You need to design and orchestrate how you want your VMs (geo-redundant, in an availability set, size of VMs, etc.). It is the key to understanding the costs of each set of VMs available to you in terms of size and computing resources. Also, understand what type of storage will be required for you to deploy your virtual infrastructure SSD storage and larger disks. Plan to use this (Standard, Basic, or Premium) and it needs to be taken into consideration depending of what you want to use Azure for.

In-house deployment, as there were Azure skills on the team.

Not applicable.

Use Azure price calculator before embarking on an Azure deployment. This will help you understand straight away what your cost expectations are on a regular basis. You can always run Azure on a 30 day trial, see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage.

In addition to AWS, I also trialed Oracle Cloud (on a smaller scale) and it is great if you are running Oracle Databases. You can also stand up your VMs and build your environment. A cool feature of Oracle Cloud is you can run a private cloud version in your data center, exactly the same experience if you are running it on a private or public cloud. The private cloud solution comes in the form of an Oracle appliance which gets configured, deployed and installed by Oracle directly in your data center.

Run Azure on a 30 day trial and see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage. You see the reason when you view the benefits of using its cloud solution, especially one that integrates so seamlessly with your environment, collaboration tools, and apps.

I use a virtual machine for remote desktop and Microsoft Azure is user-friendly.

Microsoft Azure could improve by having more virtual machine operating systems available.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately three years.

I have found Microsoft Azure to be stable.

The scalability of Microsoft Azure is very good.

We have approximately 25 companies that are using the solution. I do not know how many users are using the solution, but it would be a high number.

Microsoft Azure overall is an expensive solution.

In general, if you compare Amazon AWS with the price of Microsoft Azure host cloud service, Microsoft Azure is more expensive than Amazon AWS. I didn't see any hidden costs.

My advice to first-time users of Microsoft Azure would be for them to go through certification training. This way they would be able to understand what they are doing. Without certification, it would be difficult to understand how the system is working.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is mostly for deploying services where we do not have the local infrastructure like hardware, or where it's not necessary for us to have the knowledge about how to set up a certain service. We just want to use it without concerns regarding running the service, backup, availability, etc. That's the reason we pay Microsoft the money for its Azure services, so we can just go ahead and use the product. Some of the services they've rendered have become business critical for the company, so we're using the solution on a daily basis. 

I like the reliability of the solution and the ease of provisional services which can be a click and go. I also like the broad diversity of services that are being offered.

I find that in many cases it's more expensive than AWS, and for no good reason. The pricing itself is also quite difficult to comprehend, it's not easy to know the total cost and not worth checking the calculator because the outcome is going to be totally different anyhow. I also find it difficult that they are specific to x86 and x64 machines, I haven't found any ARM-based virtual machine images that I could run in my IP test lab, which would be a great boost for productivity because I could run the internal pipeline in the cloud and would not have to divert to locally installed devices. 

If they want to be serious with IT devices then they should find a way of deploying ARM-based devices to Azure, to get more freedom of choice with virtual machines and services. It would be hardware virtual machine image offerings to other platforms, not only PC-based or x86-based. It would make my life much easier. 

I've been using this solution for four and a half years. 

There are some glitches but it's a pretty solid solution. 

It's a scalable solution. 

Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the technical support. There were different expectations about what I had understood from the description of the support offered and what the architects of Microsoft meant to deploy. Some of the documentation for Azure is sketchy enough to leave room for questions and that had to be sorted out with support, which is not a fault that the support guys should have to concern themselves with. If the documentation is not clear and the cloud device goes, then there's clearly room for improvement.

The start was far easier than we expected it to be, but the complexity caught up with us half a year later also. It got more complex as we went along. We carried out the deployment ourselves. I'm a very experienced administrator, I know a lot about concepts of data centers. I know how they work, I know how to set them up. This is just another data center, it's just that it's not mine.

We found it difficult to train our regular Windows admins to dive into Azure things, so it's important to get the right people or the project is doomed. There are too many people who don't really want to get to grips with the cloud. I would also suggest not starting from a fully regulated basis. We have our deployment fully integrated with Azure Active Directory, which can be quite a hindrance when it comes to just playing around with things. It's essential to give people developer accounts where they can just play around, break things, work through them, like a little lab. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I am a business development director who helps my clients by providing solutions during their digital transformation journey. I am a reseller of Microsoft Azure. My clients use this solution to host their data on the cloud and to have a secure database.

This is a very stable product.

I would like to see more automation and AI with the cloud to help the clients understand more about their clients, their data history, and their predictive analytics. This would help them better manage their clients.

I have been using this solution for almost four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Some of my clients have thirty users while others have more than two hundred users.

We have received very good support from Azure here in Jordan.

The initial setup is quite complex and took about six months.

Azure may seem intimidating but you will get use to the product the more time that you spend working in it.

I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

We are using Microsoft Azure for various databases, file storing, backup, disaster recovery. It's a very useful service.

Microsoft Azure has thousands of services and products.

Microsoft Azure could improve by having the availability be 100%. Which is difficult, but not impossible.

In the future, there should be more automation.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft Azure is highly scalable.

Our customers that are using the solutions can have from 100 to several thousand that are using the solution.

We have plans to extend the usage of this solution.

The technical support is very good.

My projects are normally complex. However, the implementation of Microsoft Azure is very simple.

The length of time the full deployment can take depends on the complexity of the project. It can vary from one month to half a year. It depends on the goal of the project.

I would rate the initial setup of Microsoft Azure a four out of five.

My advice to others is you need to be technically aware of Azure services, which are always in some kind of improvement. It is helpful to be aware of the possibility and functionality of your projects and the financial cost for Azure services in the project plan.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for backups and ASO.

The ASO is great.

We enjoy the disaster recovery aspect of the solution, which is very interesting, as we pay when it is on. When it's off we don't pay. 

There is no effort investment. We just pay what is being replicated, that's all.

There is the potential to scale.

The stability is good.

We've found the technical support to be responsive. 

In a month, there is a plan to increase pricing, which is something we are not looking forward to.

We've worked with the solution since it was first released. We've used it for a while.

The product is very stable compared to if you are going to employ it in-house. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. t's reliable. 

The scalability is good. If you need to expand it, you can.

We are in Mauritius. Mauritius is a very small country. We have about 1.2 million inhabitants. We are not that big of a country. I have about 25 clients using it.

We are an indirect reseller. We do have the CSP, the cloud service provider, in Mauritius, with whom we purchase. When we have an issue, we deal with them. They do have engineers that provide support as well.

That said, if there are any big troubles then we contact Microsoft directly. So far, our experience has been very positive. The callback is within 20 minutes. It's fine.

The initial setup is not simple. You need to be trained. It's not like it's just ready to be implemented - you need to be trained in what you are doing.

The deployment is quick and only takes about one day.

We do get an ROI from the disaster recovery aspect of the solution. 

The pricing is great, as we only pay for what we use. 

That said, the prices are about to increase in the next month.

We do have some clients in South Africa and some clients in Germany, however, we've noticed that the pricing for Germany is less expensive than South Africa. South Africa has a new data center, which is likely why the price is a bit high.

We implement the solution. We are silver resellers. 

We are using the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.