Chef and AWS CloudFormation are two prominent tools in the field of infrastructure as code. Chef scores higher in terms of pricing and support, whereas AWS CloudFormation is considered superior due to its wide range of features, making it worth the higher price.
Features: Chef is praised for its flexibility, ease of use in configuration management, and straightforward deployment. AWS CloudFormation is valued for its robust integrations, comprehensive services within the AWS ecosystem, and extensive feature set.
Room for Improvement: Chef could improve its scalability, expand its support materials, and enhance its error handling. AWS CloudFormation could benefit from better error handling, more intuitive documentation, and streamlined user experience improvements.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Chef is recognized for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. AWS CloudFormation's deployment is tightly integrated with AWS services, which users report as more complex but powerful, along with extensive support.
Pricing and ROI: Chef is considered more cost-effective with a faster setup process, attractive to smaller teams or those with budget constraints. AWS CloudFormation, despite its higher cost, offers extensive capabilities and the ROI from seamless AWS integration justifies its premium pricing.
In the last couple of years, support has not been very good, even with Premier and Premium support.
Microsoft's service and technical support for Intune have been good.
While this might be acceptable for some, it can be lengthy depending on the urgency of the issue.
You have to use something like Power BI and Graph to get better reporting.
If my organization has sensitive data we don't want to leak, deploying the policies can present technical challenges and potential loopholes.
It presents challenges for users unfamiliar with coding, posing as a barrier to fully utilizing CloudFormation.
Adjusting capacity and functionality is a fundamental use.
I know what's included in 365 Premium offering, and it's a good deal.
The pricing is integrated with Entra, making it better than paying for a separate platform.
If Intune is not available, the 365 environment might not be available, causing a major ordeal.
It has been reliable and efficient in all my deployments.
Intune has improved our asset management from a security standpoint and has consolidated vendors, enhancing our security posture.
The biggest asset is the range of device management options available with Intune, whether it is a Windows device, a Linux device, a Mac device, or mobile devices.
Autopilot allows bulk enrollment of devices, making it easy for end users, even those without technical expertise, to use their devices immediately.
I can see the entire infrastructure and its connections through code.
Microsoft Intune is a comprehensive cloud-based service that allows you to remotely manage mobile devices and mobile applications without worrying about the security of your organization’s data. Device and app management can be used on company-owned devices as well as personal devices.
In an increasingly mobile workforce, Microsoft Intune keeps your sensitive data safe while on the move. Microsoft Intune makes it possible for your team members to work anywhere using their mobile devices. Microsoft Intune provides both the flexibility and the control needed for securing all your data on the cloud, no matter where the device with the data is located.
Microsoft Intune Device Management Key Features
With Microsoft Intune Device Management you can:
Mobile Application Management
Mobile application management in Intune is designed to protect your organization’s data at the application level.
With Microsoft Intune Application Management you can:
As part of Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) suite, Intune integrates with Microsoft Entra ID for access control and with Azure Information Protection for data protection. It also integrates with Microsoft 365 Applications.
Reviews from Real Users
Microsoft Intune stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to secure all devices under its management and the flexibility that the solution offers its users.
A computing services manager notes, "Its security is most valuable. It gives us a way to secure devices, not only those that are steady. We do have a few tablets and other devices, and it is a way for us to secure these devices and manage them. We know they're out there and what's their status. We can manage their life cycle and verify that they're updated properly."
The head of IT engineering at a financial services company writes, "The one feature we find most useful is the Mobile Application Manager. There are two types: we have the complete MDM and the Mobile Application Manager (MAM). We don't give our users phones, it is their own personal phone, and we need to allow them to have access to the company details on their phone. We need to create a balance between their own personal data and the company data. We deploy the Mobile Application Manager for them so that we won't be able to interfere with their own personal data."
AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to model and provision AWS and third party application resources in your cloud environment. AWS CloudFormation allows you to use programming languages or a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. This gives you a single source of truth for your AWS and third party resources.
Chef, is the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef provides a single path to production making it faster and safer to add value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is developed solely from that open source code and unifies security, compliance, infrastructure and application automation with observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development, packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more information, visit http://chef.io and follow @chef.
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