Microsoft Azure Reviews

• VM Lab

• SQL

• BI

• Ran full power during working hours and when people are not working. The server should not be running, let them sleep. :)
• Eight working hours x 5 = 40 hours
• Twenty per cent of the server ran 24/7, but if there are ns users, then it should not run full force.

I would like to see a better understanding about business and compute. Basically, knowledge of your to burn your money efficiently.

We have used this solution for over four years.

There were issues with deployment.

There were issues with stability.

There were issues with scalability.

Customer service is very good. Microsoft Azure support can replace the second level support group. Be aware of it as they are very good at what they are doing.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10.

We switched solutions due to cost.

It took less than three years for the ROI to be zero. Only experience is left. Over three years is better in-house for the ROI.

These elements are brilliant. It is a no brainer.

We evaluated Lab.

App Service is the most valuable feature because it is very simple to configure compared to the other services.

Almost all of our services to the customer are run on Azure such as the video.metricarts.com.

Viewing the expenses for each service in the Azure Portal is difficult for novices to understand; this could improve.

It's a great platform, but its visual interface is sometimes difficult to understand.

I have used this solution for four years.

Azure is very stable with its services, I have never had problems with its stability.

Most services allow you to scale easily, but you have to understand the necessary resources before scaling.

Technical support is good, they usually respond on the same day that one asks them a question. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

I've always used Azure.

The setup isn't complex; on the contrary, in less than 15 minutes I was already using Azure.

Before using any of Azure's services, investigate their prices, and in some cases, use the free plans that are available.

I evaluated the Amazon AWS option, but the simplicity of creating services was better in Azure.

Understand the scope of each service and its limitations, to avoid problems after execution.

We use Azure for DevOps, to host numerous applications that are critical to our business, and we run our software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering exclusively from Azure.

Azure Active Directory: Has powerful security and auditing capabilities that we use to secure all our apps.

Azure File services – Comes in handy often when we need a staging place for content.

Block Blob storage – Reliable and low cost for long-term storage of important information.

Azure Regions – We leverage Azure regions around the world; we love the flexibility and ease at which we can deploy and manage resources for our global clients.

The Azure Billing API could be so much better. It only provides billing metrics for a set duration. For example, if you want to look at billing for a week /month/some other duration, then you have to make all the calls, store the data separately, and run your own computation to get the results that you need. Obviously, the billing system already has all of this data, so the API should just give you parameters to specify the billing duration and return the figures accordingly.

There were very minor issues related to billing. For example, sometimes under accounts with the Enterprise Agreements, we see that storage accounts are missing access to the activity costs.

There were no scalability issues experience this far.

The level of technical support is low.

In general, there is a small learning curve in regards to the public cloud concepts and the Azure user portal, but nothing terrible.

Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool.

We considered the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but decided to use Microsoft Azure for a few reasons.

First, we believe that Microsoft will emerge as the preferred public cloud provider for the enterprise-class workloads and scenarios. Second, for our development goals, we could not spread ourselves thin by supporting multiple public cloud providers. Another reason is that most of our clients are using Office 365 and are Microsoft Azure clients themselves. Thus, it is more efficient for our solution and for the work that we perform, to be local to their existing applications/data. Finally, Microsoft Stack is something that we are already familiar with, and Azure being Microsoft, we felt it matched best with our knowledge and expertise.

Make sure you understand the cloud’s pricing model. Depending on your scenario, i.e., in rare cases, it may be more economical to do things on-premises.

Regarding some of the SaaS offerings in Azure, again, understand the pricing because it might make sense to leverage what they have as a service. In some cases, you may want to build it and manage it yourself.

Also, pay attention to which Azure Region you spin up compute and storage because the pricing can vary between regions and not all the offerings are equal across the regions.

By migrating our infrastructure to Azure, we have been more agile on several fronts as an organization, from been able to create proof of concepts on the fly, to being able to make changes quickly and repeatedly.

• Compute (App service, and virtual machine scale sets): The ability to manage Windows and Linus virtual machines.

• Monitoring and Management: Ability to use log analytics to search, collect and visualize machine data from on-premises and cloud.

• Data Analytics: Security and Identity (Azure Active Directory): This feature adds multi-factor authentication, self-service password reset and group-based application access.

• Storage (Azure files): Still in preview at this stage, its allows the creating of SMB 2.1 shared folders on Azure storage service.

• Azure Site Recovery: Allows the replication and recovery of VMs hosted on Azure, thereby extending business values of almost any size.

• Networking (Azure ExpressRoute): This feature allows the connection of data center with Azure via private link that does not travel over the internet. Advantages include security, lower latency and higher reliability.

Every area of the product still needs to improve as it can always get better. Windows wasn't where it is today decades ago. There was a continuous improvement and evolutionary changes. Same is expected of Microsoft Azure.

Specifically, I would like to see better Azure Data Analytics and monitoring RF.

Azure is very stable with no issues at all.

The ability to scale easily is one of Microsoft Azure strength, one can start and scale up as traffic increase or as the business growth is required. So we didn't have issues with scalability.

The technical support is great.

We never used a different solution. We had a PoC with every vendor in the same competitive space and decided to go with the best.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as we knew what is required from the technical perspective and as a business. Which we specified in an architectural design before hand.

Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support.

We evaluated some other competitive products and decided to go with Azure as its suit and meet our business requirement.

You need to have a clear vision of your business expectation from the product. Define your business requirements, objectives and ensure that your cloud provider can support those requirements.

Consider the cost, location, licensing, and technical capability to support and guide your organization.

We have most of our servers running as VM's in Azure. While still a hybrid environment, we are gradually moving all our servers and applications to Azure.

Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Domain Services make it possible to have Azure VM's join a domain without the need for additional domain controllers. Users can join their CYOD to Azure Active Directory using their Azure credentials. With MDM in place, we also have the means to manage all devices, CYOD or BYOD.

The Disaster Recovery service - Azure Site Recovery (ASR) has enabled us to have our production servers and applications replicated to Azure and ready to take over in case of a major failure or when a site goes down. In addition, ASR helps us save money on expensive hardware.

It has helped us to scale, no matter what Azure feature you use. Scalability is of the utmost importance.

Regarding improvements:

• MDM: Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Intune features are slowly moving over to Azure. I think as an integrated feature, there will be better ways to manage mobile devices.
• Azure backup: It is still hard to configure and to figure out which Azure backup component to use for backing up different data on various storages.

We have been using the solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is skilled.

Everything you do for the first time can be complex. Setting up a VM in Azure is straightforward, but setting up a Disaster Recovery plan or moving a complete infrastructure to Azure can be complex.

Most of the complexity has to do with initial lack of experience. Diving into the material, study and hard work together with colleagues helps a lot.

An experienced System Administrator with years of on-premise experience will be able to make the move to Azure.

As a consultant, I leave this area to my sales colleagues. When in doubt, contact Microsoft. They will be able to clarify your questions.

We are a Microsoft Gold Partner, so we only use MS products.

Features such as Azure object storage, IaaS, Azure System Center, Azure SQL Database are valuable to me.

It provides:

• Scalable workload with elastic cloud capabilities

• Hybrid IT management of the on-premise and cloud workloads

• Disaster recovery

Azure is growing its open-source offerings and I see this as a continuous area of improvement.

I have used this solution for six years.

Early on, there were issues with the workload interruptions. Over the past 12 months, it has been a stable cloud service.

There were no issues with its scalability.

Technical support is one of Azure’s strengths, I would rate it above average to excellent.

I previously used Savvis and Verizon’s IaaS Enterprise Cloud solutions.

The initial setup was moderately complex. The use of PowerShell greatly increases the ability to fine-tune workloads, i.e., after the initial setup was completed.

If you have the existing on-premise licenses, make sure to ask for their special licensing promotions so as to allow consolidation of licenses and subscriptions, in order to maximize the current investment and control TCO.

We looked at other solutions such as AWS, Google's Cloud Platform and Terremark/Verizon.

Leverage their cloud credit program so as to allow your team to become acquainted with Azure, before turning on their cloud billing services.

The availability of the humongous amount of features and solutions in Azure are most valuable to us.

The continuous improvement of Microsoft is amazing. The agility and speed at which Microsoft is doing all this is really amazing.

The improvements are more on the partner's part than on the product's part. It is difficult to keep up with the continuous improvements that Microsoft is doing.

Issues were seen in the size and unclear configuration settings. If the bandwidth is limited, it can be an issue when migrating from on-prem to off-prem.

We have implemented this for our customers since the very beginning.

This depends on the support contract which you subscribe to. The free support is bad, but the paid versions have better support, i.e., more you pay, the better the support.

The other solutions that we had used before were on-premise solutions. We saw a major shift of the resources towards Microsoft Azure.

The setup was straightforward; with the help of TechNet, if there were any issues then they were easily solvable.

In regards to the pricing and licensing, you need to be aware of what to do. If it fits in your current licensing contract, add it to that contract. If not, then depending on the company's size, ask the reseller with whom you are doing business (or ask me) for advice on this issue.

We did evaluate other solutions and, in some cases, we also advised for this product, as it is specific to certain workloads. AWS and Google are the other vendors that we looked at.

Have a vendor agnostic partner to look at your environment and discuss the vision you have on this.

This product helps companies to build their own infrastructure in the cloud without the need of any physical server. This is nice for new, small companies. For big companies, there are services like containers, docker, and infrastructure as a service for making their environment less heavy and saving some costs, using hybrid infrastructure and service concept.

The most valuable feature is the possibility of using Microsoft and non-Microsoft services on one environment. For example, Windows servers, Linux servers, backup solutions from Veeam, etc.

There is no one special feature for me, as it makes sense as a complete package. I would mention container services as well, as this is the most modern concept of bimodal IT. For example, doing development in companies without the need of building development servers. You can just using some special parts as micro-services and putting them together like Lego pieces. This is the real benefit of cloud and Azure.

There should definitely be some improvement in the UI. It is lacking in terms of where the end user has to click on other icons and go back to the main menu to change some small settings and then go back through many options to the main request. This is something which Microsoft is constantly working on, but still it needs improvement.

Monitoring options should be more sophisticated, as there are dashboards on which a end user is able to pin a lot of charts and a number of web parts, but for example, I would love to have some option like in Operational Management Suite. For instance, some queries and filters Maybe those are already there, but I have not been able to find them. I have to combine the Operational Management suite for Infrastructure, PowerBI for subscription and Application Insight for applications.

Alternatively, I can create a PowerBI dashboard for everything, but this is not for everybody, as it is not always so easy.

Managing of separate subscriptions if you have more than one and in separate domains, it is not so easy to manage. I can’t merge all of my subscriptions, as I am able to have only one enterprise subscription in one account.

There have been no stability issues. I have some problems related to subscription management, but this is because I have more than one subscription and there were some problems related to merging those into one management.

There were no issues related to scalability at all.

Technical support is provided by ticketing system in the portal, so you can create a ticket and a few hours after that, the support guys will contact you, and will try to call you during business hours and will help you immediately. I had really specific problems a few times that needed longer discussion with support, but standard tasks were quickly resolved.

Nice and smooth since the beginning.

Related to pricing and licensing, you have to be careful how you operate with the concept. You would like to set some automation rules for automated shutdown and start up your virtual machines so that they are not consumed costs, etc. So it is about the logic of using this solution.

We evaluated Google and Amazon.

Prepare everything before implementation. Make your plan and calculate what should be the best solution or alternative for you.

This solution is at the top of what you can get at the moment on the market. There are huge amounts of separate tools and scenarios from infrastructure monitoring and administering, to hybrid scenarios or quick service creation and maintenance. The main benefit is the possibility of creating quick services, which you can select from many Microsoft and third-party service providers as well.