Microsoft Azure Reviews

Our target markets are advisors and all the staff they need to manage for their customers, such as regulatory information, accounting tax, tax income, tax regulation, accounting, balance sheets. We have also targeted different niche countries. It's a very regulated market and these are our principal customer.

At the corporate level, we have another division. That does not produce or sell software, but content, normative content, educational content.

For the software division, we work with advisors and payroll consultants.

Microsoft Azure has helped organizations because they no longer need to do a lot of server maintenance.

The valuable features of Microsoft Azure are that it is cloud-based and has good storage. The storage is completely managed by Azure. We do not need to do any patching of security because it is handled by Azure which is a benefit. The solution is fully compatible with the Microsoft technology stack and is very scalable.

All the Microsoft Azure's interface for managing the portal is very good and responsive.

The solution should improve the shared cache. For the shared cache, Microsoft uses RADIUS third-party services. We have a lot of trouble with RADIUS and I suppose that is due to the fact that is not owned completely by Microsoft.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately five years.

Microsoft Azure is highly stable.

Microsoft Azure is scalable in my experience.

We have approximately 400 customers with many terabytes of data. We have some customers that are using this solution that has 400,000 customers.

At the moment our product is intensively being used by the advisors that are onboarded because our software is the primary tool for the advisors.

If we have a problem with Microsoft Azure we open a ticket with Microsoft and they respond very quickly and are very helpful.

I have previously used other solutions but nothing comparable to the Microsoft Azure cloud solution.

We chose Microsoft Azure because it's tied to Microsoft technologies. We are already working with Visual Studio and other Microsoft technologies, such as .NET, and other on-premise products. The migration path is all shorter and our corporation suggested using Microsoft Azure.

The initial setup is difficult because when you move into a fully managed cloud environment with a lot of services, you change your mind completely about how you operate and in the first month we had to learn a lot of tasks.

Looking back to the past the difficulty was not the interface of the solution, there was a lot of information to know and to have knowledge about concepts for cloud service that took time. There was a lot of documentation and finding the correct one can be difficult sometimes. When I used Google to find something, I can find a lot of information but the problem is to find the current information or the most effective information.

There is a lot of different elements you need to set up or configure, such as the environment, monitoring, deployment of applications, preparing the dashboard for monitoring, and the continuous development integration by clients.

We have two kinds of deployment, a continuous integration deployment when we don't change the database schema. This is fully unattended and can be done online with no problem for the users. It takes approximately 30 minutes but the time can vary.

Once a month, or less, there is a major release. In this case, often we modify the database schema. This requires stopping all the applications, no user can have access while the modification to the database is taking place. The operation takes from half an hour to an hour and a half depending on the database schema and the types of modification required. When we change the structure of tables we have hundreds of thousands of records that can take a lot of time.

We are moving to a more continuous development strategy. We are trying to have more applications because at the moment we have approximately seven web apps and a lot of services, but they are too tightly bound to the database. They're trying to divide them for more flexibility and to have continuous deployment. We had no continuous deployment. Normally we deployed some minor releases once or two a week, and there is a major release once a month. We are moving to have more continuous deployment.

We are working this year on test automation from unit test integration. They're investing a lot in this because we managed numbers for the tax declaration. Regulation can be problematic.

We are producing, maintaining, and are selling solutions for our customers, such as Microsoft Azure. We do not use an integrator.

We have a two-person team that does the implementation and maintenance of the solution. Once you prepare the infrastructure, sometimes we have to improve by changing some things. Recently we had to prepare for the disaster recovery from Europe to Europe, and we had to invest time in the pipelines and deployment.

When you have on-premise solutions you have to manage lots of aspects, such as security, patching, large expense, and acquiring hardware and servers. With Microsoft Azure, you have the ability to activate a lot of processing power and then dismiss it when you do not need it. It saves you a lot of money not have to have the infrastructure or the maintenance. 

The cost of Microsoft Azure depends on the services that are used and there can be a discount at a corporate level from Microsoft.

In the next release of Microsoft Azure, they will be addressing the problem of the continuous  ETL workload to continually extract the data and ingest it in a docker analysis database. This will be released in the next version released in 2022. Microsoft Azure is continuously improving the solution for the market.

It is important to know that cloud services work differently than on-premise solutions.

I was talking with our colleague in the internal department to let me test the scalability of his system because we have a process from our application to the online shop. They are having a problem with the scalability test because of their hardware. They have hardware that they can't scale the testing environment. Using Microsoft Azure we do not have these issues because it is on the cloud.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

Our current client is in the securities business, so we deal with a lot of trading data, like securities, holdings, etc. We evaluate the data quality of the daily file that comes from the current providers and transform that data using PowerPlay and Dashworks.

We're building cloud-based data warehouses by adapting on-premises data warehouses in MySQL Server. Initially, we migrated everything to the Azure SQL Data Warehouse to take advantage of all the MPP technology and stuff. In the process, we realized it was expensive for us, and we didn't need all that capacity, so we migrated that code to a simple Azure SQL database. We made it work from that point.

In our current project, we're using Power BI with Azure. We directly import data from that SQL database into Power BI using PowerPlay and ask the client architect to do some data engineering so we have serverless capacity in Azure. Right now, we are migrating to Azure Synapse, and we are actually in the process of doing a couple of PLCs with serverless capacity. Maybe we'll also use Databricks. 

Azure Data Lake is useful. We are in the process of populating the data lake for our current project. Also, we are directly importing for Power BI to using PowerPlay.

There is room for improvement on a couple of Azure services. One that comes to mind is Data Factory. Microsoft has improved a lot of Data Factory's capabilities, so maybe it's now possible to make a green custom database within Azure and Data Factory. 

I think it would be good to keep making progress on giving users the ability to do action calls on Data Factory. Right now, it's mostly local. Perhaps Microsoft could add the ability to put some calls in the workflow. Airflow is a good example. You might say, "Why not just use Airflow?" And maybe you could use that, but I think it would be better if all these things were possible with Data Factory. 

We've been working with Azure for a couple of years. I work for a tech consultancy, so we're not tied to just one project. We work with one client for a year or so, and then we work with another client the next year. Mostly we build data warehouses with SQL using Microsoft Synapse. We also do some things with Power BI and PowerPlay.

Azure is stable. We've never had any problems. 

When you work on the cloud, it's a straightforward process. You start on a PLC and start adding more components like maybe some security with a private network and so on. It's effortless for us to scale by adding additional components. Scalability depends on the service you're going to use. For example, if you are going to change from a SQL database to another database or another inter-processing ending, it's not going to be that easy. It happens with all providers. 

It is easy to set up Azure. For deployment and maintenance, we have a team of five or six people consisting of one tech leader, three developers, and one QA.

Azure's pricing could be more competitive. Some clients mentioned that they are considering switching to AWS because of the price. And AWS can provide you with the instant capacity called SpotLink. 

I rate Microsoft Azure eight out of 10. It's okay for all the use cases we've had so far. If you are going to do it on your own, make sure you read the documentation. All the information is there. Microsoft documentation is good. But if you don't want to take on that burden of reading documentation and so on, you can contact support. They'll know better than you. This is crucial because of the cost. If you choose the wrong services, you could waste a lot of money. 

We have our data lake on it. In terms of deployment, I believe we have a hybrid deployment.

We can temporarily build out an environment for different scenarios, such as testing, and when testing is done, we can shut that environment down. So, we do not have an overhead in our own data center.

The ability to scale down is a big thing.

It can be improved in terms of ease of billing or monitoring of the billing. That gets to be a little difficult.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is absolutely stable. Microsoft doesn't want to sell something that isn't.

Its scalability is excellent. You just turn something on, and it is there. We have not made any reservations on it. We can scale up and scale down as needed. There is nothing that we have that is a commitment.

We probably have about 500 users, and they are administrators, developers, BI folks who actually manipulate it and create reports, and then we have end-users for the data. They are the people that use those reports.

In terms of the plans to increase its usage, right now, we're going through a merger, which will impact the data a little bit. So, we are in a holding pattern in terms of scaling up anything until that merger gets completed.

We go through a third party for that, and their support is really good.

We were fully on-premise with some SaaS platforms, and we then moved to Azure for a part of that.

It was complex, and that was mostly because of the security needs. We had to understand how things fit together.

The original deployment, just for testing, took about half a day, but to really get it going and to be able to allow access to people, other than the administrators, took more time. We're a financial institution, so we had to have everything monitored and secure. It probably took about four months to get it functional on the production side.

We used a consultant. They were excellent. They knew exactly what they were talking about. They were able to give us not only what was needed presently for our deployment but also the things to think about as we let the environment grow in the future.

For its deployment and maintenance, I've got security folks who watch what's going on. They make sure that only the right people are getting the right data, and it is not being allowed to folks who shouldn't have access. I have nothing public-facing on it. I've got administrators. I've probably got three people in security and five people in the administration. We're a 24/7 business, so it is split across all of that time.

Originally, when we implemented it, it was basically in a like-for-like way, which is not the way the platform is designed. So, once we were able to really get in there and figure things out, we figured out that we could use a much smaller footprint. That helped us out quite a bit in terms of a return on investment. We are seeing probably about 75% of the regular data center cost in Azure, so there were 25% savings, but we could see that go down as testing was being eliminated over different platforms.

Currently, we do not have anything reserved. There are no reservations that we have built into the Azure environment, so all of our licensing is on a consumption basis. As things spin up, those licenses spin up.

In terms of the additional costs incurred beyond the standard licensing fee, such as for operations, it's kind of tough for me to judge because I already had a fully-staffed operations team in a fully on-premise platform environment. So, we didn't spin up anybody extra for that. It just changed what they were doing.

We evaluated other options. We decided to go with Azure because we understood the licensing and VMs and how all of that worked together. Prior to the merger, we were looking at bringing the platform onto AWS. It wasn't that we were necessarily exclusive; we just felt that this was our best first step.

I would advise understanding what data you're going to be putting out there, and what your security requirements are for that. You should be ready to have a workshop so that everyone involved knows what's going on. Get a good understanding from the accounts payable team about how the payments are coming in and how to monitor them.

I love the product. From a procurement standpoint, I don't have a lot of control over it. Unless we've got some contracting of what we plan on doing, I don't have a lot of control over licenses, etc. An administrator can just go out, do it, and put the licensing in place, and then it is like you've got to pay for it. It doesn't function well in a P2P type of environment.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We're using Azure Premium P1 and it hosts our website and most of the applications we use. We are an airline company and for some of our enterprise apps, it enables things like single sign-on and hosts most of our virtual machines, as well as some of our web servers for the on-prem application. Our customer mobile app for purchasing tickets is for that purpose but we also use it for enterprise apps. I use Minecraft for my email security, but I integrate it with Azure to incorporate the single sign-on, as well as for multifactor authentication in my Office 365 environment, and the productive Parti app. I'm an IT security specialist and we are customers of Azure.

The feature I appreciate is that everything is basically shift forward from a security standpoint. Most of our systems are integrated with Azure for authentication purposes. Given that I'm a security specialist I use it for that purpose. The rest of the team uses it more for things like application deployment. I also use it to determine sign-ons, and things like compliance to devices. 

Microsoft allows you, via Azure, to have different authentication methods. You can use the Microsoft Authenticator app, text or voice, or something called a FIDO, which is like a USB security key. Unfortunately, the authentication method only allows me to have up to 90 users, and there are 2,300 people in the company. When I have to push multifactor authentication, I cannot specify certain users for the authenticator app. It forces me to lock it down and say conditional access only allowed.

Another issue I have is that Microsoft notifies me retroactively about certain things. For example, when a user sends an email with over 200 recipients, it can take half an hour for me to get a notification but sometimes it can take 24 hours. I have the same issue when it comes to things like phishing attempts. It's a problem. 

I've been using Azure for three years. 

The solution is stable, although I'd like some advance warning when they make changes. It can sometimes take hours to update so that if I have a user using multifactor authentication and I take them off, it can take up to an hour for it to take effect.

Technical support is very good. 

I can only speak from my own experience and I have many Microsoft certificates, including as a Microsoft solution architect expert in Azure, so it might be easier for me than it is for others. I tend to do a lot of things on the app and I use it on a daily basis. Even if I don't know where something is, the documentation on techniques, everything is there. I wasn't involved in the deployment at this company but in my previous position, it took a couple of days, not very long. Microsoft provided support. It's just a matter of configuring the tenant.

I would recommend Azure because there's a lot of documentation available and a lot of user guides, it has everything. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We use the solution to manage and secure my users' email for the Active Directory.

The solution’s initial setup is a bit complex.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for seven months.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

Only two users are currently using the solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

We pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution, which could be cheaper.

We are currently evaluating how to maximize the use of services to back up our database. Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based solution. I would recommend Microsoft Azure to other users because it has many services that will benefit companies.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We have deployed the NMS network monitoring system in Azure. We can monitor the network through it. There is no need to deploy an NOC (Network Operations Center) in my country. If we use Audiovi and Airspace there and install the NMS network element and Microsoft, everything is configured in Azure. Configuration is done remotely from anywhere. By entering Azure, we monitor the NMS network.

The stability could be improved.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is good. 

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward and user-friendly. 

Azure offers a trial version, which you can use for free before proceeding to payment.

We are using the free version.

I recommend the solution to use it. This solution is cost-effective, with high uptime and zero downtime.

We use the solution as part of the scrum agile methodology. 

We use Azure DevOps' full hierarchy to manage our data workloads. From product management to development and QA stages, Azure DevOps provides tools. Additionally, we're implementing automation testing and integrating it with our CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps. This platform helps us manage all our processes. 

The main advantage of using it is that it supports a smooth workflow from development to QA, following the Scrum Agile methodology. It manages the sequence of tasks and sprints. The tool's integration capabilities are good. 

Microsoft Azure needs to improve its customization capabilities. Each organization has unique tasks and fields that it wants to use. Additionally, the search functionality could be more flexible. 

I have been working with the product for five years. 

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate the solution's scalability a seven out of ten. 

I haven't contacted technical support yet. 

I rate Microsoft Azure's deployment ease as five out of ten. It takes around a month and a half to complete, while our sprints take two weeks. Moreover, we conduct three rounds of testing and development. 

The product is expensive. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

We use the email accounts and SharePoint. We want to use the AI and OCR services, but we do not have many use cases.

I get all the features under one roof.

The subscriptions are complicated. The process is not user-friendly.

I have been using the solution for almost one year.

The tool’s stability is good.

The tool is scalable. Around 30 people use the solution in our organization. We are trying to get projects from Europe and North America. Once we get more projects, we will be scaling up.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took me around one week to set up the product. I did the deployment myself since I am into IT.

The return on investment is good because everything is in the cloud. We save a lot on infrastructure costs and server costs.

I pay a yearly subscription fee for the solution. The pricing is normal compared to other service providers. I can increase or decrease my subscription based on my organization's needs.

We are into data management. We do a lot of data consumption and data validation. We need a lot of virtual solutions and storage solutions to process data. I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.