Microsoft Azure Reviews

We have been using it to modernize customers' environments. We propose that the customers consider moving a number of things into the public cloud instead of building and maintaining everything on-premise. 

The organization can focus more on real business problems instead of IT problems. It can also reduce the time spent setting up the infrastructure. This then makes the organization more agile and, in a lot of cases, more reliable. With the public cloud, if your design is okay, the chance of running into a serious outage is, in most cases, lower than that when relying on your own on-premise IT infrastructure, particularly in the case of companies with 50 to 500 people that typically don't have very big IT budgets.

I think the most useful feature has been the remote desktop. It has been very helpful when customers have old applications that are not architected to run remotely.

In my opinion, what could be improved is making the actual costs more predictable. It is very difficult to estimate the cost or the budget you are going to need to run your environment in Azure Cloud. You have to be a specialist to understand how you will be charged, which constantly changes.

As for additional features, it would be great if the pricing could be cheaper for those trying to study and use the cloud. Having a discounted pricing scheme or even a free usage scheme, like a sandbox that is free to use on a continuous basis, for those who are studying would help them to actually generate more business later on. The more people learn to use the clouds, the more business they will actually attract.

They will start pushing solutions into the cloud, but if they have no time or opportunity to learn to use it, they will not be confident in proposing cloud solutions. So until they have been able to validate it in a test environment or a learning environment, they won't take the risk and propose a cloud solution.

I've been involved with this solution for one year.

I think Microsoft Azure is fairly stable. It also depends on how you set up your design.

As advertised, the scalability should never be an issue. The only thing that would stop you from scaling would be that your application has an architecture that is not scalable.

For public clouds, customer service/technical support is okay. In general, the documentation is very good.

For those who are familiar with Azure, the initial setup is not that complex. However, for those who are using Azure for the first time, it's probably a bit more involved because they may need to create their own virtual data centers in the cloud with the necessary security measures. I think that often this is a bit underestimated mostly because of a lack of knowledge on the part of the new customer.

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.

I would rate Microsoft Azure at eight on a scale from one to ten. 

I would advice others to take the time to study it carefully because there's a lot to understand and a lot to know before putting a solution in the clouds. Don't underestimate the complexity.

I primarily used the solution for hypothetical cases. I used the solution to look at the 2019 active directory environment, some remote SQL storage, and storage access from on-premises to the cloud.

There's a feature for automated tasks. As an administrator, handling administrative-type tasks, it's quite useful. For example, I was spending lots of money when I would spin things up. I'd spin up a SQL server. I'd spin up different types of things. They cost a lot of money. I would get distracted, walk away, and go to bed. I'd get up in the morning, and I'd see I'd have a bill. Therefore, I spun up an automated task and wrote a PowerShell script, put it in an automated task, and it would run at seven o'clock every night, and delete all my resources. It saved me money.

You can build an environment in minutes. It's very good in terms of being an infrastructure as a service, and I found that really fascinating.

All the devices they have up there that replace existing devices in the real world like load balancers or F5 are helpful. I'm not sure how they relate or how they form compared to F5, or the firewalls compare to the ones that are in data centers, however, they looked all right to me.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales extremely well.

It's a bit of a mystery how the storage is going to perform. For example, when you've got a storage device like Hitachi or NetApp, you can run reports on that storage and you can do all this good stuff. I'm not sure if that's the case with Azure. A lot of the stuff is kind of proprietary, at the moment.

The cost is quite high.

You can't control the data as much as you would like to. When it's theirs, it's theirs. With Hitachi, Hitachi has its own policies. You can move data around based on how much it's used into lower-cost discs and whatnot. You might be able to do that with Azure. However, I can't verify that.

The initial setup is complex.

They need to make storage easy and offer more interconnectivity between solutions.

I've used the solution for about a year or so. Maybe a year and a half at most. It hasn't been that long.

In terms of stability, I've seen it go down twice now. They've had two problems with the active directory. That said, I would describe it as stable. They have different sites, regions, and whatnot, where you can move your data around in case you lose a data center or you lose a region. However, if you lose the active directory, that can take everything down.

It's not any more stable than an enterprise environment, to be honest. Maybe a little bit, however, if you lose a network connection to it, that's not stable.

I worked in a bank, a huge 50,000 employee enterprise. I saw their infrastructure go up and down about the same, once or twice a year. That's about the same as Azure, therefore, it's not anything different than an enterprise. You can make an enterprise resilient if you have lots of domain controllers and you do lots of redundant paths. 

The solution is very scalable. It's one of its great selling points. If a company needs to scale, it can do so with ease.

I've never been in touch with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

For a layperson or someone who is not trained, it wasn't an easy initial setup. It had some complexities.

I've personally gotten used to the process. The deployment, for example, wouldn't take that long now. While in the beginning, a deployment might take a month, now that I am more comfortable with the solution and more familiar, I can likely do it in a few days. 

That said, it depends on a company's plans and its own unique environment and complexities. It can vary. Most people seem to struggle with all of the connections they had before.

The number of people you need to deploy or maintain the solution really depends on the size of the environment. After implementation, you could probably scale back your employees from 10% to 50% with Azure.

I can handle an implementation myself. I'm getting better and faster at it.

I've found the cost to be a bit high. You also get dinged for extra things along the way.

The charges are also unpredictable. Even if you think something is a relatively static item, they'll charge you for it and it will change your expectation of the cost.

I've looked at other solutions, such as Hitachi and Netapp.

The biggest struggle a person would have these days, as an architect, is to determine what the cost-benefit of going to Azure would be rather than going to a storage device such as a Hitachi or a NetApp. Which has better value? What's going to be better in the next couple of years? You can really get screwed if you're going to be pulling data down from the cloud. If you pull a lot of data from the cloud, it's going to cost you. You don't get charged for putting it up. You get charged for pulling it down.

I basically used the solution to study.

I used a few different deployment models. I made an on-prem environment, Hyper-V environment, on my laptop and I connected it to the cloud.

I'd advise those considering the solution to not put all of their eggs in one basket. By that, I mean, it's a good idea to go hybrid and not full cloud. Going hybrid covers that network loss that you could suffer if you lose the network. If you lost a data center or a region, you could still have your on-prem server running an image of the cloud onsite.

I'd give the solution an eight out of ten. I haven't had a chance to study AWS or Google, however, I like this solution very much.

We just use it as a virtual environment.

It has been good financially because no CapEx investment is required for any of the on-prem infrastructures. It is an OPEX model, so it is easy for budgeting.

Its resiliency is most valuable. It is also a very scalable solution, so you can spend the resources on demand.

The interface for configuring the environment is not very intuitive. Certain things are at different places, and it is not easy to navigate.

They should have a more transparent licensing model. Currently, Microsoft's licensing is a bit clunky, and it keeps changing depending on the type of subscription you have. Different features are included, and sometimes, it is very hard to figure out the right licensing. So, the commercial aspect of the licensing can be improved, and they can make it easier to understand all the features that are included.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.

I can't complain.

It is a very scalable solution.

Thankfully, I didn't have to use support. We have a CSP, and we are dealing with our partner who deals with Microsoft on our behalf.

I am not sure, but I think this is the first cloud infrastructure that we have used.

It has a pretty straightforward deployment. There are just a couple of clicks. The deployment takes about a day.

We used the reseller.

Price-wise, it is comparable to other solutions for the features that we are using.

It is pretty straightforward. I would advise others to just make sure that you have an architecture that you want to implement. You need to understand what you want to achieve in order to build or configure the platform correctly. The infrastructure, architecture, and design are very important to fully understand what resource groups do you want to use because you're building around the resource groups. That's pretty much it. 

We are thinking of increasing the usage of the cloud, and I'm looking at alternatives. After all the research is done, we will see if it is going to be Azure or something else.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a ten out of ten because it is doing everything I want it to do, and I don't really have a comparison with other similar products.

We are using Active Directory in Azure, so it's for all of the Office 365 services.

This product is quite easy to use and is available on-demand.

There are so many services available that the interface is a little bit messy, and when you're looking for a specific service, you have to know exactly where to search. Having better visibility in the interface would be an improvement.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for a couple of years.

This is a stable product and we plan to continue using it.

Azure is a scalable solution. We have approximately 150 users.

We have used technical support and it is very good.

As a cloud-based product, there is no installation.

This is an expensive product.

In summary, this is a good solution, and other than some improvements to the user interface, I cannot think of any features that are missing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's similar to AWS.

It's an infrastructure as a service.

It's a cloud service, so it's always up to date.

If you compare it with AWS, it is not very friendly to use. I find the UI better to work with on AWS.

They easily provide service with Windows, but not with Linux.

I am a beginner, and only been using Microsoft Azure for a couple of months.

Microsoft Azure is pretty stable.

It's a scalable product. Because it's a cloud service, there is an infinite opportunity for scaling.

We only have one or two people who are using this solution in our organization.

I reached out to support once, but they were not that quick to respond.

Technical support could be faster.

I have experience with AWS and Microsoft Azure is not that friendly. It is a bit complicated compared to AWS.

It's a cloud service. There is no installation.

It is expensive, but it is less expensive than AWS.

Even with it being cheaper than AWS, the price could be cheaper.

It is similar to AWS, where it is on-demand and is billed monthly.

We are not currently using this solution and we are not sure if we will be using it in the future.

 For those who are connected to the Windows Operating System, I would recommend this product. However, I would not recommend it for a Linux environment.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it to host virtual machines and migrate new web applications to the cloud.

With Microsoft Azure, we have a platform that lets us easily deploy applications to the cloud.

They should create integrations with more platforms.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for a couple of years.

It enables great scalability.

We are satisfied with the support from Microsoft.

It was quite easy to setup.

The current pricing is on a pay-as-you-go subscription.

The solution is basically a platform as a service for web applications, virtual machines, Azure identity, et cetera.

My day-to-day is to migrate servers using Mover or some other app to access on-premises data centers. We then use Azure Migrate to move the servers in order to take advantage of the new functionalities and things like that.

The solution offers good monitoring features that allow us to configure items better in the customer environment. The monitoring is really awesome.

Occasionally, clients have specific requirements for their applications and we can move them onto Azure services or apps. 

Overall, it offers a better way to move the applications and monitor or configure the applications with higher availability. For example, there are load balancers, different types of layers that load balancers use, traffic managers, Front Door, and things of that nature that are available to us and the client via Azure.

Overall, I like how the solution works. It offers everything I need, for the most part.

The user interface is very nice and makes everything easy to use.

The power share modules have been improved, and the AC module was introduced - which has been great. There are ten or 15 more regions on the way as well.

The tools on offer are excellent. It has some really great environment assessment tools as well.

There are preview features we are waiting on. When I contact Microsoft support, there is no timeline given or clear information about when those preview features are going to be on GA, general availability. It would be ideal if they could finally give us at least an estimation of how much longer we have to wait.

Support could be improved. If you pay for a higher plan, it's okay, however, the lower plans don't offer as good of a service experience. It also seems as though each different tier doesn't talk to the other. they should be able to communicate and share details internally with each other so that they are learning from each other instead of staying siloed.

I've been using the solution for the last few years. I would estimate it's been about five years at this point. It's been a while. I've definitely been using the solution over the last 12 months.

In terms of stability, for me, it works. However, depends on the type of project that's happening. If you're going to have just a virtual machine running there then it can fail. That said, the platform offers a lot of options to improve the capability, so it depends on how much money a client wants to invest.

The scalability works just fine. I've had some issues before with Azure App Service, with an App Service environment allocation, however, Microsoft has improved that, making a bigger rack. Since then, I haven't seen issues with scalability. That was maybe a year ago.  

We currently have three clients on Microsoft Azure.

There is room for improvement with technical support. I work with premium support and therefore don't really face issues. We have good engineers. There are some issues when you get a new support person. They have a lot of rotation in their personnel. They train people for a couple of months. They're trying to help however, it's not the same as getting a seasoned professional. It really depends on the support line you buy. If you go for a lower tier, you're likely to get less experienced assistance.  

For the most part, the initial setup is straightforward. It was not overly complex. I worked with a Microsoft support engineer. I had contact with the product group and know the technical advisors and technical matters, which made it very easy for me.

For example, in comparison. I tried to use Amazon Web Services by myself, and I got confused as I didn't have that level of support. With Azure, the interface is nice, and it's pretty straightforward. Anybody with a little bit of technical knowledge about working, virtual machines, or similar items can use it with little to no problem. The implementation is pretty good.

The time it takes to deploy the solution depends on the customer environment. If they have 25 servers versus five there will be radically different deployment times.

Typically, we use Microsoft strategies as a foundation assessment. We'll look at the customer environment and be in the background for a couple of weeks to pull some data so we can have a better understanding of the customer environment. After that, we create a plan to start migrating the servers. Each client is unique.

I worked alongside a Microsoft support engineer who assisted in the process.

You do need to pay for technical support and there are different tiers of support you can get. The higher the tier, it seems, the better the service you can expect.

I haven't used AWS or Google Cloud, therefore I don't really ever compare this solution to them. I don't say "this platform has that and I like how this works". For me, Azure just works and it's fine and I don't need to go in-depth and look at other options.

The company I am working at new does use AWS and we're planning to introduce new cloud technologies as well. 

I'm not a salesperson, however, I can say that we would move the client to whichever technology made sense to them after doing an evaluation of their requirements. That, of course, is handled by a different department.

We are a reseller and a Microsoft Gold partner. We are a CSP, a Cloud Solution Provider. We offer managed services to our customers. We are moving data centers to Azure, however, we are a managed service provider. We have access to the customer's environment in order to pull analytics data to help them with consulting services, and things like that.

My basic advice to those considering the solution is that planning is essential. Microsoft does a good job of advising their customers at the outset to ensure they get what they need, however, it's helpful to go in and understand deeply what it is your company needs overall. 

That said, Azure is a strong cloud and its technology is great. Microsoft offers good implementation with service legal agreements and good practices.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

It's primarily used for access to the cloud or the virtual machines and to have a cloud-based solution that can handle tasks such as data processing, or for having data storage, and all types of other things.

The product is very flexible.

The performance overall is great.

It's a great advantage for a company to be on the cloud. It gives a company nice advantages.

The solution has proven to be quite stable so far.

The solution has been scalable.

There are no new releases per se; the solution simply adds on more services over time. 

The solution needs to offer more data analysis services. It would be extremely helpful to Azure's clients if they had more of this.

I've been using the solution for about a year or so. I believe it's been around 12 months. It hasn't been that long.

The stability of the solution has been very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

So far, we've found the scalability to be pretty good. If a company needs to expand, it can do so with ease.

We have about five people working directly on the solution currently.

We haven't really dealt with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. I've never had any direct interactions with them personally.

There isn't really an initial setup. It's on the cloud. You don't really have to deploy anything or set anything up.

Our customers don't have to pay any licensing fees in order to use Azure.

As we are on the cloud deployment model, we're always on the latest version of the solution. It is always automatically updated for us.

Overall, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been pretty happy with its capabilities so far.

In general, I would recommend the solution to other organizations.