Microsoft Azure Reviews

We are customers of Microsoft and I'm an IT architect.

The solution reduces work for our IT teams. They don't have to keep things up to date, and we can concentrate on our mission. The best feature for us is the help we get from Microsoft to migrate applications to the latest release and support efforts. It saves us a lot of time. 

The cost is a big issue, it can quickly go up if you don't control things. We've set up a system that shuts down machines regularly so we don't run up costs. Sometimes our development teams start up machines and forget to shut them down, and we see our costs go up quite rapidly with monthly surcharges. It would be helpful if Microsoft didn't change the control panels quite so often. It means we need to retrain personnel whenever things change and that seems to have an impact on our IT teams.

We've been using this solution for nearly four years. 

Stability is good and the solution is easy to maintain. 

Scalability is really awesome. We don't have to worry about it at all, we're really impressed. Everyone in the company uses Azure. 

Tech support is great. I find that we get answers quickly. It's just the first line of support that I criticize sometimes because it seems that whenever we open a ticket, they give us a run around with certain questions that basically we've answered. But as soon as we get into the next level of support, it's more advanced and questions are answered quite rapidly. Our tech guys know how to open a ticket and basically provide all the available information that they need. We sometimes have to get through that initial loop, and answer the same questions again and again, until they push us to another level of support.

Four years ago the initial setup was quite complex but lately I find it's becoming increasingly easier, and the set up rules for securities are a lot simpler. These are things that are improving all the time. 

Licensing is on an annual basis. 

If a company wants to concentrate more on their mission and less on supporting infrastructure, they should give Azure a go. I find that it saves us a lot of time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are a consultancy company. We provide technology solutions for our clients. We use Microsoft Azure to provide infrastructure for our clients. 

Active Directory is a good feature. The infrastructure features that Azure provides are also good.

There should be more language options for the Azure Functions apps. It supports programming languages, but there are only a few options. It could have more programming languages. 

I have been using this solution for one year.

It has good stability. It has an availability of 99,9%.

It has good scalability. It is an automatic process. 

It is a retail solution. Therefore, we have a lot of users. We probably have direct and indirect users in thousands.

I don't like their support so much. The support of Microsoft is not fast enough and should be faster. They have a lot of layers or levels. I used to get in touch with them through the Azure Portal.

The initial setup is easy. We have developed a DevOps automatic process, which makes it very fast to deploy. It takes just a few minutes.

I would advise taking care of the intermediate layers between your business and Microsoft. They aren't good.

I would rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten. This rating is based on the general features. If they put more programming languages, I would rate it a ten. It is a good product.

We are an SD-WAN vendor and we deal with a lot of networks. Microsoft Azure is one that I use regularly.

It's application migration. We run a network as a service from Azure. People are migrating to Azure, either it's MS SQL, SAP on Azure deployments or just running on Azure that we connect. 

The primary use case is to provide the SD-WAN to connect their remote offices and users to Azure and the data center.

Azure is pretty good and in fact, we have about 100 customers who are using Azure on our technology. These are some of the largest manufacturing companies in this region.

Azure is a good networking solution from a WAN perspective.

Features and functionality from a scale perspective, at least in the top three, are very compatible. These are AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

I would like to see all of the cloud providers be more compatible with each other. All of the big organizations, such as large manufacturing and banking and financials, use Azure, while other places will use Google Cloud to AWS. Compatability between these is important.

I have been associated with Microsoft Azure for the last three and a half years.

Azure scales like any other cloud.

As a partner, the technical support is pretty responsive.

We also use Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, AWS, and we are set up with multi-cloud.

I think Azure and AWS are similar in terms of pricing. Google Cloud is cheaper compared to either of these two. Google Cloud on the same sales chart. It is 30% to 40% cheaper than AWS or Azure. The Azure additional option is even cheaper than Google Cloud.

The initial setup was easy.

Pricing is comparable but from a cost perspective, this solution is the cheapest.

We use both Private Cloud and Public Cloud. For Banks it's generally through Private Cloud, otherwise, it's on a Public Cloud, as we deliver services as well on Azure.

This is a product that I can recommend to others.

I would rate this solution 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.

Azure cloud is a platform for many things, such as hosting, file services, application or power apps, and data lake. All these things are a part of Microsoft Azure. We're using it as a full suite. We are a big tenant with all solutions for Microsoft. We are using the latest version of Microsoft Azure.

The redundancy across different regions is the most valuable. It provides a big value for cloud services, especially for Microsoft.

The level of authorization or authorization cascading can be improved. We have the most powerful admins and then we have sub-admins, but the level of authorization is not that easy to handle or manage.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for three years. I am using this solution on a daily basis. It is the main platform that we have.

Its stability is good. It is very stable.

It is very easy to scale. We have more than 7,000 users. 

They are pretty sufficient. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We also have different cloud vendors like Amazon and Salesforce, but they all are for different purposes, so it depends on the service.

The initial setup was simple. It was done in stages. 

We had the full support and dedication from Microsoft for its installation. Its maintenance is done by a vendor, and we also have some technical support from Microsoft when we are doing this stuff.

Microsoft always provides the entry-level solution with a cheap license. Once you start to like the product, then you have to pay for the full package, which is more expensive than the entry-level solution. Every feature comes with a license and a cost. Some licenses have multiple features, and some features require a specific license.

I would advise starting directly with Microsoft and then asking the vendors to recommend the trusted partners to work on the implementation or migration, and not vice versa. First, talk with the architect of the design and see if they can recommend a trusted partner who can do the implementation.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten. It is a big product and platform. It covers many things in terms of features.

We use it to extend our own data centers and banking scenarios for banking solutions.

It provides us with access to technology that's not available in any other form. It only exists in the cloud. In order to keep our solutions modern, we have to do it through the public cloud.

Kubernetes service and API management are the most valuable.

It should have a better hybrid-cloud central analysis. Their support service also needs to be improved. Our main concern is support calls. Our issue is basically related to the technical functionality of the services that we use. It doesn't behave as expected, and support often fails to solve the problem.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is pretty stable. It has very good stability.

It is scalable. There are no issues with scalability.

We have a maximum of 200 users. They include internal developers and other types of profiles.

Their support service needs to be improved.

It is complex because the solutions are complex. It depends on how you want to do the setup. For our business scenario, it is complex because there are a lot of security rules that are involved in it.

It is competitive with other public cloud providers, and its price is very close to different cloud providers. There is not a noticeable difference between different cloud providers. Otherwise, it would be a risk for them to have services that were much more expensive than their competition. They're pretty much neck to neck on pricing.

I would advise others to go for the closest possible platform as a service. Do not go for infrastructure as a service; go for platform as a service.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

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.

The product is being used for document sharing and archiving. The company wants their customers to be able to pull certain documents that they put on file. The idea is that through active directory B2B, they will offer access to the different files and customers will be able to pull the files they need from the server. The company uses information protection to make sure that only the right people have access to the right files. We are integrators, mainly on the software side. We are partners with Microsoft Azure and I'm a senior solution architect. 

The company has different vendors that they bring in. This product has made it easier to onboard those individuals and to provide access to them when needed and then to basically cut them off when the time comes. The way they have it set up, documents can't be downloaded. They are only accessible online but can be accessed from anywhere so the company doesn't have to worry about setting up VPNs and the like. They provide a username, password, a two-factor authentication and that enables access.

Information protection is a good feature because you can label different documents and different files, and that allows them to put like NDA files in a specific bucket, as opposed to just regular, safe or confidential storage.

This solution is not user friendly to set up and it's difficult to understand, particularly with regard to information protection and the sort of licensing needed to utilize it. Simplification would go a long way. 

I'd like to see them improve on the watermarking. There's a feature that allows you to watermark documents that are checked out. Currently it watermarks a document with whoever publishes it. For example, if you wanted to watermark the email address, it doesn't watermark with the person checking out the file, but with the person publishing the document. It would be more valuable if the watermarking was related to the person checking out the document, in case it leaks out.

I've been using this solution for several years and on my most recent project, for the past six months. 

The stability has been great. We haven't had any issues whatsoever with stability.

As far as I know, scalability is fine. Our current customer isn't huge so I can't speak to enterprise size customers. It's not infinite scalability, but it is Azure Cloud. If you need more storage, you buy more storage. 

The initial setup is fairly complex. There is a ton of documentation, but once you get through that it's really not difficult, it's just not intuitive. The product requires better documentation that explains things. I think a lot of it has to do with the licensing requirements. It's not obvious and so you can be following a step-by-step tutorial and still not get it right because the software requirements aren't right but it doesn't give you that in clear text. 

You can probably set this up within 30 minutes, realistically, as long as you know all the steps. Unfortunately, it took about four or five hours to troubleshoot the situation because we didn't understand what the license requirements were. We had to go and obtain those licenses and try it a second time. It'll be fine now because we understand it but there are certain things like having to be a security administrator within the roles and responsibility matrix, and that's not really outlined in the documentation.

The company wanted it to deploy rapidly. They didn't want to spend a lot on this project to buy storage, and clear that storage, ensuring that it was 100% secure. This was either going to be a very short-term project or it was going to blow up to something large and they weren't sure which direction it was going to go. Enabling them to use OPEX spend just to utilize what they need when they need it at a low cost, was super valuable to them.

I would recommend anyone wanting to implement this solution to carry out background homework on active directory, on information access management (IAM), and then understand the licensing before you deploy. That aside, it's pretty straightforward. I've learned that setting up secure documents doesn't have to be difficult as long as you take into account those caveats of understanding your licensing and active directory.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.