Microsoft Azure Reviews

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.

The use case varies by client. Sometimes it's financial tools or websites. We build tools for DevOps applications too. Our most recent use cases are retail and construction.

Virtual machine services, in SaaS services, M365, and Data Lake are all popular with our clients. 

When you use one feature in six months or a year, it changes for the others, and it isn't very easy. The filters are too complicated. I'd like to see better integration with S/4HANA integrated and other services, like monitoring, for example.

I've used Microsoft Azure for approximately two or three years.

Azure is highly scalable.

In my experience, Microsoft support is outstanding. We're Microsoft partners, so when we need support, we get it immediately. 

I think the setup is complicated, but if you have experience with other Microsoft products, you should be able to figure it out. The time needed for deployment depends on the client and the solution. For example, it's very different in the case of Data Analytics, which took us two or three months to deliver the solution. 

The price of Azure is competitive with other cloud providers. 

I rate Azure nine out of 10. 

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.

The typical use case is where you are trying to avoid investing in a solution that you are only going to be using on a limited basis. You need a pay-as-you-go solution where you can have access when you need it, but you don't have to make a major long-term investment. For example, say you need a software application but you want someone to build that application for you, and you don't want to invest in hardware or networking or other things for on-premise deployment. You can have your solution hosted on the cloud on the Azure platform so that it can be accessed from anywhere and you don't need someone to take care of it or maintain it. You can access your software application from your home or wherever without having to worry about the server going down or anything like that.
In these cases, a cloud-based platform like Azure or Amazon Web Services can be useful.

Azure is very user-friendly. I was able to create some database servers really fast. The user interface is intuitive. I don't work on the networking or firewall side of things. So I'm not familiar with those areas. 

Some of the capabilities available in an on-premise SQL Server aren't available in Azure. For instance, we found Azure Managed Instance to be lacking in certain aspects. One of our clients decided to stay on-premise rather than migrate to Azure because of this reason. Maybe Microsoft is working on building these capabilities in the future, and we are unaware. 

I've been using Microsoft Azure for a couple of years.

With Azure's capabilities, like sharding, we can really scale it up. They also offer features to increase performance, such as the ability to switch between performance tiers as needed.

It's fairly easy, but it really depends on a lot of factors, such as the size of your application, how many databases you have and how many web servers you have. 

We outsource some of the work of the actual deployment to external consultants. And we don't do any work on the hardware side of things ourselves.

Azure uses enterprise licenses, and I believe they are on a yearly basis. One piece of feedback from other users I have heard from is that Azure is somewhat expensive, so I would advise anyone thinking about this solution to be aware of the cost. You need to take into account the configuration you are going with or it could turn out to be a more expensive solution than you anticipated. Sometimes, I feel that it may not be very straightforward for a consumer to estimate the cost. It's important to be clear in terms of your budget and what you're actually purchasing.

I would rate it eight out of 10.

We don't use DevOps; we just use the Azure Cloud platform. The solution is primarily used for PaaS and FaaS.

The solution has been very stable.

We find the product to be scalable. 

The security network inside of the information on the network is very good.

Technical support, from what I understand, is quite helpful and we speak with them regularly.

There aren't really any issues with the product itself. For us, the problems are organizational and the processes inside the company, which uses Azure, aren't as clear. They need to define a good process and a good implementation strategy going forward. We only really have issues with what they want to do, and not the technology itself. Basically, the technology is not the problem. It is just the way we want to use it.

It would always be nice to have even more integration capabilities.

A company needs to have strong finance managers. It could cost a lot if you haven't got a finance function inside each company.

The installation process is complex. 

The pricing could always be better and a bit more standardized.

I've been using the solution for five years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable and reliable. The performance is good. It's not buggy. there aren't glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The product has been very scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

At this time, I'm not sure exactly how many people are directly using the solution.

While I haven't personally used technical support, our company does have a technical account manager on the Azure side and we are coordinating each week to identify all the topics we need to address - including our disaster recovery plan, which is important to the company right now. 

We did not previously use a different solution before we chose to work with Azure. 

The installation process is not very straightforward. 

When you want to install with a higher level of security inside the infrastructure, nothing communicates. Therefore, engineering security and network engineers need to understand what they have to do exactly, and what the problem is. With Aure, there's a learning curve for installation. You need to work with it for at least one year before you get comfortable enough and are able to troubleshoot and configure everything relatively well.

The solution has the potential to be expensive if you as a company are not careful as to how you use it. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. For me, it's a perfect product and I enjoy its capabilities. 

I would recommend this solution to other users and organizations. 

We use the solution for multi-factor authentification while sorting out the identities. We want to use this solution for as many applications for the authentification process.

One of the features I have found to be valuable is the scale set feature. We have been able to get good results scaling up and down our applications. Additionally, the dashboard is fuctional.

There needs to be better data security. There are organizations that do not want their data to be submitted to Microsoft, they should have strong encryption.

In the future, Microsoft should increase its data center percentage in Africa.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution has been stable.

We have found the scalability of the solution to be good. We have approximately 4,000 people using the solution in my organization.

If we are having a hard time finding a solution to an issue the technical support has been very quick to respond.

The initial setup is straightforward for me since I have done it before, for people new to installing it could experience some difficulty.

The solution does not offer very many free services which can become expensive. We are on an annual license.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

In our company, this solution is mainly used for configuring devices and enabling them to be used by multiple users. I'm a developer. 

The product is valuable if you don't want to spend a lot of money configuring your own devices on different machines. I like that if I only want to use limited features, I don't have to pay for it. 

The solution is not particularly user friendly so that could be improved. With Microsoft Azure it's quite difficult to do anything freely or try my hand at something new. I think the solution is also lacking in security. I'd like to see the option of a free account for carrying out a POC and the ability to play around with the solution without any restrictions. 

We've been using this solution for a year. 

This is a stable solution.

We have the server on cloud so it's scalable according to demand. All of our staff use it, and we have 15,000 users.

I previously used AWS. In comparison, Azure is a little restricted because of the security features and, as a developer, I'm not comfortable with that. AWS is more user friendly and in general, people find it easier to use. AWS is easier to install and to experiment and play around with to get a feel for the product.

There is no setup as such, it's on a server and it's a matter of configuring on the cloud. If you need, you can spawn 3,000 machines with a single execution and 10,000 or so test scripts within minutes.

I would definitely recommend this solution. 

I rate it an eight out of 10. 

We are a solution provider and Microsoft Azure is one of the technologies that we help our clients to implement. For example, when one of our customers wants to migrate from on-premises to the cloud, we assist them with the process. Once they decide on technology, we build the solution.

Our clients implement Azure to use as Infrastructure as a Service.

The most valuable features are the interface and customizability.

The approach used for cloud migration is something that I like.

Documentation and community support are good.

Dashboards and reporting could be improved.

I have been working with Azure for three years.

Azure is a stable system.

There are no issues with scalability. We have a range of customers that vary in size from small to medium-sized businesses, as well as enterprise-level organizations.

I am happy with the good support that we are getting. I have not been in contact with them directly but some of my colleagues have dealt with them.

The installation and initial setup are easy. We implemented over the course of a few days. 

Reducing the price would be of benefit to our customers.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to do a proof of concept first. This is what I suggest to all of our customers, especially before migrating to the cloud. It will ensure that it meets the requirements.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.