Microsoft Azure Reviews

We use Microsoft Azure in two places. The first use case involves the Chatbot framework, and we've been using that for 18 months. This is what we predominately use it for.

Our second use involves hosting some of our critical applications. It allows us to address some of our human resource use cases in the area of policy queries, as well as some backend actions.

The automated connectors to some of our critical enterprise systems are an important feature. These are very large, critical, global HCM systems.

The library of predefined use cases is very helpful and we found the HR use case that we needed within it.

There are improvements needed from a roadmap standpoint. Some of the roadmap items that they typically publish don't move at the same pace.

The predominant area in need of improvement is support.

Microsoft needs to continue working on out-of-the-box connectors to contemporary products in the market, specific to different verticals such as finance and HR. Investing in this would be helpful because it means deploying solutions faster. We've had challenges in terms of having to custom-build some of it and at the same time, the roadmap contains more connectors.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for the past 18 months.

This is definitely a stable platform. I haven't seen issues in that respect.

Azure is a scalable platform. We have more than 10,000 people in the organization that use it from an application standpoint. The end-users could be managers or other employees in a variety of roles.

Our in-house administration team has fewer than 40 people that work with it.

At the moment, we have no plans to increase our usage.

The primary support needs to be improved. I would rate them as moderate because from a technical and service guarantee perspective, they are pretty good. However, when it comes to new roadmap items or handling requests, or adding new activities, they are moderate.

This is the first such solution that we put into place.

The initial setup is pretty much straightforward.

Our initial deployment took between six and eight weeks. This period had more to do with our setup being compliant with some of the features on Azure. 

We worked with the Microsoft consulting team during the deployment.

The team was knowledgeable but there were some areas that they could have done better. For example, we had issues with our enrollment and some of our IT requirements at the organizational level. We could have perhaps used some architecting skills.

For permanent maintenance, so we have a hybrid model when it comes to maintenance. We've outsourced some of it, and that really comes from a fixed contract so we don't control the number of people that work on it.

Internally, we have two people; one who manages the services, and the other one is more of an administrator.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Microsoft Azure is to first, very clearly agree on the terms of deployment. Second, get the initial design and prototypes for your specific implementation vetted and signed off at an early stage because this will help with security clearances and data privacy clearances. These were the two major learning points for us.

In summary, this is a good platform but there are several areas for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

The use case for Azure is maintenance. Azure maintains the infrastructure so we don't have to, and that's the best use case for any cloud-based application.

Azure is very flexible.

Any time you use a cloud service, there are increased security risks. If you want more security, you have to have private hosting.

I've been using Azure for about five or six years.

In general, I think Microsoft support is strong.

Azure could be cheaper. Of course, if you ask anyone, they'll always say it could be cheaper. We are paying monthly.

I rate Azure nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others.

Public Cloud

We have a complete Microsoft ecosystem. Azure comes with a variety of parts such as infrastructure as a service and platform as a service or SaaS. We are using it for infrastructure as a service and software as a service as well, so both SaaS and IaaS are being used.

All of our solutions are being deployed on the Azure server. We use the Azure authentication functionality across our organization, which is a single sign-on functionality, so it is Azure-based. We also are incorporating the DevOps framework, which, again, is being integrated to Azure. Our complete backbone is being moved to Azure, and most of our systems are moving to the cloud version.

I think the single sign-on functionality and the ease with which you can deposit things on the cloud have been valuable.

Azure has very robust security functionalities and authentication features, which come with mobility, along with backup and credential checks.

Scalability is also very robust because you can deploy the solutions on the go, and along with that, it provides you an ecosystem to integrate with the existing Microsoft products. For example, we have Power BI, and it's very nicely integrated with the Azure cloud version.

The interface is quite user friendly and intuitive. The reporting is perfect as well.

Integration with other services could be much better.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for over two years now.

The stability is very good. As it is a Microsoft product, the reliability is very good.

Because it's a cloud-based solution, scalability is not an issue at all. We currently have over 200 development team members using Microsoft Azure.

Technical support staff have been responsive, and the support was good.

The initial setup was a bit complex. It was getting ruled out sometimes, but it was at a Pan-India level. So, it was expected to take some time; it took about 8 to 12 months. Overall, it was good.

I believe that we have a three-year license, and I'm happy with the pricing.

I think Azure works best when you have the complete Microsoft ecosystem. Then, you get the real value out of it. In my firm, we have the complete enterprise licensing model. So, we have an integrated ecosystem, which provides a very collaborative way of working, along with the ease of creating.

If I were to rate Microsoft Azure on a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at nine.

Private Cloud

The fully integrated capabilities of a PaaS service.

Basically we would not be building the Healthcare IT application if it were not for Azure.

The management console needs work and the pricing calculator is truly user hostile.

I have been using the solution 3 years.

We have some issues with functional differences between Azure Active Directory and how Ad is implemented on a standalone server.

We have had a few outages with Visual Studio Online – though they have not been a major work impact.

None so far.

Customer Service: Mixed. Microsoft still has too many support queues and if you end up in the wrong one you can spend hours being bounced from one to the other. OTOH once you figure out how to get to the Business support queue – response times are fantastic for “business outage” issues.Technical Support: When in the right queue – the understanding is unparalleled.

I have previously used AWS and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Azure is a PaaS whereas AWS is a server stack environment and thus AWS does not provide the OpEx cost reductions that Azure does. Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS but it is not as fully developed as Azure.NET is.

Very straightforward. In fact almost too much so. Its easy to try and overthink the setup and waste time looking for things you don’t need to be looking for.

Combination of in-house and vendor. Vendor team was new to Azure.

Full ROI on the current project is still to be determined as we are not shipping yet. But I would estimate a 100% cost reduction over the traditional way of building a server based app.

Our monthly dev costs for infrastucture are running $300-$500 for the initial work and we expect to have full OpEx costs of $1,000-$3,000/mo once we are launched.

AWS and Elastic Beanstalk.

Have a team that understands .NET development and particularly someone who understands Active Directory very well

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.

We are using Microsoft Azure for many purposes in our project. We have a cloud-based SQL Server and we are bringing data to Azure DB through the Area feature. We are using SQL Server as a database, and from there we are using the data for analysis. We are doing forecasting using all the data. 

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is the Area feature. Additionally, the SQL Server DB as a serverless pool is useful, storage-wide external tables are helpful, and PolyBase is very good at reading external data. The capacity of Synapse to analyze in analytics is very good and it supports a range of data.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately one year.

The scalability could improve.

We have many teams that are using this solution in different projects.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft Azure a four out of five.

We did not contact the support from Microsoft Azure often.

I rate the support from Microsoft Azure a four out of five.

Positive

I did not use another solution prior to Microsoft Azure.

The deployment of Microsoft Azure is easy because it is cloud-based.

We have one person that can deploy Microsoft Azure when they have proper access rights. If the project is small it can be seamless. For example, I'm handling a 10 to 12 person team, and for deployment, one person that has all access writes can deploy Microsoft Azure seamlessly.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

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 are customers of Microsoft and I'm the IT technical manager. 

The most valuable feature for me is the high level of availability and the 99% uptime of the system. I also appreciate the technical simplicity of the system in terms of implementation.

I'm currently based in the Philippines and the availability of services locally could be improved. Technically speaking, I'd like to see more flexibility in terms of storage or resource allocation. Resourcing is currently quite fixed so that if you want to move between level two and level three resources, or customize resources, you can't do that. The discrepancy in terms of costing is around $200. If they improved flexibility for selecting resources it would be easier for us to get the costing approved.

I've been using this solution for around two years. 

The solution is stable, one of the most reliable in the Philippines. The downside is that currently all the services are outside the country. Singapore and Hong Kong provide the closest service but we have laws that prohibit certain amounts of data residing in other countries. None of that affects stability. 

One of the key takes from using cloud services is scalability and flexibility. If a company hits some roadblocks financially, they can reduce infrastructure and also reduce what they use in the cloud lowering the cost. 

I've had several outages or major issues and I've had good experience with technical support. They resolved the problems in less than a day. The only downside is that in the Philippines you're dealing with the vendor and not Microsoft direct. I have two steps of support; if the vendor can't provide the support, then they escalate to Microsoft. 

The initial setup is quite simple. We currently have 20 users on the infrastructure side in addition to 20+ developers.

We have difficulty in getting the costing approved. We pay for a virtual machine and the resources currently implemented there, then we need a license from Microsoft Windows OS and the database itself. In our latest license purchase, the manager approved a monthly fee of around $2,000 for the resources we use. If you're going to the cloud, that's currently included in the cost and will be less if you have the software assurance from Microsoft; on-prem is more expensive.

The big takeaway on this product is the high availability of the system on cloud and reduction of on-prem costing. There are no concerns about the electrical doing some redundancy in between, cooling, purchasing, procurement of IT equipment. Instead of budgeting based on CAPEX, we're doing it from an OPEX point of view. One of the key takes for moving to the cloud is the cost. You can leverage with the cloud and let go of some things required to maintain a system on-prem, the kinds of things that alleviate some complexity in doing maintenance of the system. The solution is suitable for any size company. 

I highly recommend Microsoft Azure. Everyone knows Microsoft so the learning curve is easier. I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

Hybrid Cloud