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Microsoft Azure vs Virtustream xStream comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Azure
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
324
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (1st)
Virtustream xStream
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
27th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 8.7%, down from 17.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Virtustream xStream is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure8.7%
Virtustream xStream0.8%
Other90.5%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Abid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
Versatile integrations and reliable customer satisfaction elevate cloud service experience
For Microsoft Azure improvement, they need to enhance their support system. The first level of support should be improved in terms of quality and response time. They need more technical support at the first level, as there are currently only one or two technical people among five to ten staff members at this level. They should ensure that the first level support is more technical because we normally provide services to technical users ourselves. When an issue arises, it usually escalates to the second or third level. When facing first level support, they may have limited knowledge and only collect screenshots to forward to their seniors. They should ensure that the first level support is aligned with L2 and L3 to better assist us, especially since we mention in the ticket that our issues are related to specific problems and require that sort of support.
RH
Business Systems Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Improves efficiencies, has encryption, and great mission-critical customer support
Previously we had an amateur solution where we were managing on our own data center but we had the management in-house. It was a strategic move to give people who were more competent and with business focus other core initiatives. It was a strategic outsource model. The equipment we were using was out date and at the end of its life cycle, we had to make some transitions, do a hardware replacement, or move on. We moved on to this solution.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"I like everything, overall."
"The most important thing is we don't have to maintain any physical infrastructure. With typical conventional on-premise solutions, we have to maintain many things like the hardware, clusters, etc. With this cloud platform, you don't have to worry about all those things. We have the service always available, and this is the main advantage. I like that we use everything on our standard Active Directory on on-premises on Azure. The key advantage is that you can have the sole indication based on the cloud. This isn't possible with an on-premise Active Directory. This enables work from home and at the office because it's on the cloud."
"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."
"It is easy to deploy."
"If you're interested in going with Microsoft, my advice would be to do it. Everybody's using Microsoft."
"We've mostly been quite happy with the capability of the solution."
"I have not had a problem with the stability. It is reliable."
"Once we made the move to this solution, we received efficiencies, 100%, 200%, even up to 1000%, depending on some processes."
"The solution has encryption which we did not have before."
 

Cons

"The permissions and controls in the product are not easy to use."
"I would like to get a forward-looking view of the services I want to cost."
"It would be nice if there was an on-premises version of the solution, and it wasn't just cloud-based."
"It should have cost optimization tools."
"The price should be lower."
"I think better accelerators and better tools that can be used to migrate and leverage the existing models and data schemas are needed."
"I would like to see more advanced functionality in terms of information security."
"The solution could use mutual segmentation for servers. It would be ideal if you could constitute something like five or 15 groups among the groups of different computers inside Azure."
"Our account representative was inexperienced, they could improve on how they are managing accounts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a very expensive machine and I would like for them to improve the price. There are smaller sized competitors who offer cheaper prices."
"Licensing costs for Enterprise are on an annual basis."
"I pay for a yearly subscription."
"We are on a monthly subscription for Microsoft Azure and the cost is more expensive than some of the competitors, such as Amazon AWS. They should be more competitive with other solutions."
"It is not cheap. Its price could be a little bit less."
"The pricing model can be improved because we find that Azure pricing is a bit high."
"Price is good and many free features available"
"Customers need to purchase additional services because of the complexity of it."
"The solution is a bit expensive, we are still negotiating the price."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
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Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business141
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise153
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...
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Also Known As

Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Continental, Domino Foods, Florida Crystals, Intel, Lanx, UOL Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: June 2026.
904,899 professionals have used our research since 2012.