Microsoft Azure Reviews

In my department, we primarily use AWS. However, for single sign-on, we use Azure Directory. It helps with integration when logging into various systems. The IT operations team utilizes Microsoft Defender for tasks such as tracking various endpoints and conducting business reviews.

The tool's most valuable aspect is the account management side. This involves tasks such as assigning credentials to different individuals, managing user accounts, and implementing Privileged Access Management. 

The tool should add an interface that is similar to AWS. 

Microsoft Azure is stable. 

My company has around five to ten users for Microsoft Azure. It is scalable. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

Microsoft Azure is expensive. 

The tool is a great product to use, and very intuitive. It is beneficial for users and enterprises. I rate it an eight out of ten. The product is easy to learn, but it may become difficult depending on your technical ability.

Our primary use case is mostly for deploying services where we do not have the local infrastructure like hardware, or where it's not necessary for us to have the knowledge about how to set up a certain service. We just want to use it without concerns regarding running the service, backup, availability, etc. That's the reason we pay Microsoft the money for its Azure services, so we can just go ahead and use the product. Some of the services they've rendered have become business critical for the company, so we're using the solution on a daily basis. 

I like the reliability of the solution and the ease of provisional services which can be a click and go. I also like the broad diversity of services that are being offered.

I find that in many cases it's more expensive than AWS, and for no good reason. The pricing itself is also quite difficult to comprehend, it's not easy to know the total cost and not worth checking the calculator because the outcome is going to be totally different anyhow. I also find it difficult that they are specific to x86 and x64 machines, I haven't found any ARM-based virtual machine images that I could run in my IP test lab, which would be a great boost for productivity because I could run the internal pipeline in the cloud and would not have to divert to locally installed devices. 

If they want to be serious with IT devices then they should find a way of deploying ARM-based devices to Azure, to get more freedom of choice with virtual machines and services. It would be hardware virtual machine image offerings to other platforms, not only PC-based or x86-based. It would make my life much easier. 

I've been using this solution for four and a half years. 

There are some glitches but it's a pretty solid solution. 

It's a scalable solution. 

Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the technical support. There were different expectations about what I had understood from the description of the support offered and what the architects of Microsoft meant to deploy. Some of the documentation for Azure is sketchy enough to leave room for questions and that had to be sorted out with support, which is not a fault that the support guys should have to concern themselves with. If the documentation is not clear and the cloud device goes, then there's clearly room for improvement.

The start was far easier than we expected it to be, but the complexity caught up with us half a year later also. It got more complex as we went along. We carried out the deployment ourselves. I'm a very experienced administrator, I know a lot about concepts of data centers. I know how they work, I know how to set them up. This is just another data center, it's just that it's not mine.

We found it difficult to train our regular Windows admins to dive into Azure things, so it's important to get the right people or the project is doomed. There are too many people who don't really want to get to grips with the cloud. I would also suggest not starting from a fully regulated basis. We have our deployment fully integrated with Azure Active Directory, which can be quite a hindrance when it comes to just playing around with things. It's essential to give people developer accounts where they can just play around, break things, work through them, like a little lab. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are using Microsoft Azure for various databases, file storing, backup, disaster recovery. It's a very useful service.

Microsoft Azure has thousands of services and products.

Microsoft Azure could improve by having the availability be 100%. Which is difficult, but not impossible.

In the future, there should be more automation.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft Azure is highly scalable.

Our customers that are using the solutions can have from 100 to several thousand that are using the solution.

We have plans to extend the usage of this solution.

The technical support is very good.

My projects are normally complex. However, the implementation of Microsoft Azure is very simple.

The length of time the full deployment can take depends on the complexity of the project. It can vary from one month to half a year. It depends on the goal of the project.

I would rate the initial setup of Microsoft Azure a four out of five.

My advice to others is you need to be technically aware of Azure services, which are always in some kind of improvement. It is helpful to be aware of the possibility and functionality of your projects and the financial cost for Azure services in the project plan.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

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. 

Azure Cloud App Services can be classified as a MEAP, Mobile Enterprise Application Platform. It is also a Platform As A Service solution. These Cloud PaaS services are the backbone and the back-end structure that you can use to build omnichannel applications (mobile + web SPA + Kiosk). Azure App Service eases the creation of flexible Express Node.js or .NET WCF microservices. It has an API based on OData and integrated security with OpenID Connect with federated or corporate login. If you need a quick mobile solution, particularly an enterprise mobile solution, this is a wonderful choice.

We use this solution as a template to build mobile, back-end-of-corporate-omnichannel apps. 

When mobile is a necessity for an already-running corporate system, you do not want to lose time setting up a whole new environment and platform. You need something that can help you easily put in place all the scaffolding you need, and concentrate on the business solution that you are providing. Azure does this.

The time-to-market. Once you master the technology, you can create running, mobile back-ends in a few weeks. Additionally, it easily enables integration with legacy environments (like connecting to existing servers).

Scalability is definitely in need of improvement. Azure is a very good solution but it still lacks the performance of other cloud platforms.

We had issues with the Mobile Service ORM and the Azure SQL Database (cloud version of SQL Server). At times, the queries that are created automatically from the ORM mapping are not very well optimized for this database and that can lead to performance and stability issues. On occasion, the connection manager from the ORM does not handle the database connections very well.

Azure does not handle scalability as well as its competitors. Sometimes a 10 percent increase in a server with 20 percent of CPU usage pushes the server up to 100 percent load, and you start having performance issues.

Microsoft allows you a certain number of tickets, depending on the cloud plan that you are paying for. If you have an available ticket, technical support is great, but if you happen to have none, it will be more difficult to find good support. 

Once you gain a certain level of expertise on the platform, you will be able to handle most of the problems. Also, now that the platform is very open (Node.js + Express) it is easier to access good documentation and an excellent community.

We tried many solutions. We tried Kinvey and Kony but prices were absolutely prohibitive for our customers. We also tried BAASBOX which is now a (mostly) defunct open-source MBaaS solution.

We move forward with a .NET customized solution that we created ourselves but maintenance of a general platform requires a lot of work and we couldn’t afford to charge our customers for the required amount of work.

We tried AWS Mobile Services once but our customers preferred Microsoft Azure (their existing back-end was mainly implemented in .NET, and they preferred to stay in the Microsoft world).

We also built a solution with SAP Mobile gateway which is the safest choice for companies that have huge legacy systems already running on SAP.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You can very easily have an application up-and-running almost out-of-the-box. The learning curve is steeper once you need to start building more services or when you need to take care of performance issues.

The cost-benefit equation for Azure is very good, particularly for small applications. However, Microsoft should do much, much more to improve how costs are communicated and how to forecast them. The Azure Pricing Calculator is not useful.

We checked the big players in MBaaS, particularly Kony and Kinvey. Kony was extraordinary (circa 2013) but the price was prohibitive. Kinvey was also very good and prices were slightly better but not affordable at all for our customers. We started using WAMS, Windows Azure Mobile Services, the previous version of Azure App Service, which was one of the first MBaaS solutions. Microsoft improved a lot the platform with App Service.

I would rate Azure at nine out of 10. The previous version of Microsoft's mobile cloud platform, Mobile Service, had some security and scalability problems but the new version, App Service, has many improvements in these areas. It also uses open-source tools and allows developers to work in isolated environments, in their own workstations (without all the hassles and costs of putting the cloud into the developer’s cycle).

If the mobile application is not that big (up to 15 services) and time-to-market is very important, Azure App Service is a great solution. If you need heavy integration with an existing .NET legacy system, this solution will also work very nicely and will reduce costs. If you need to implement a much bigger system, my advice is that you should think about gathering a specialized team that has a very good grasp of the platform.

We use Azure for DevOps, to host numerous applications that are critical to our business, and we run our software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering exclusively from Azure.

Azure Active Directory: Has powerful security and auditing capabilities that we use to secure all our apps.

Azure File services – Comes in handy often when we need a staging place for content.

Block Blob storage – Reliable and low cost for long-term storage of important information.

Azure Regions – We leverage Azure regions around the world; we love the flexibility and ease at which we can deploy and manage resources for our global clients.

The Azure Billing API could be so much better. It only provides billing metrics for a set duration. For example, if you want to look at billing for a week /month/some other duration, then you have to make all the calls, store the data separately, and run your own computation to get the results that you need. Obviously, the billing system already has all of this data, so the API should just give you parameters to specify the billing duration and return the figures accordingly.

There were very minor issues related to billing. For example, sometimes under accounts with the Enterprise Agreements, we see that storage accounts are missing access to the activity costs.

There were no scalability issues experience this far.

The level of technical support is low.

In general, there is a small learning curve in regards to the public cloud concepts and the Azure user portal, but nothing terrible.

Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool.

We considered the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but decided to use Microsoft Azure for a few reasons.

First, we believe that Microsoft will emerge as the preferred public cloud provider for the enterprise-class workloads and scenarios. Second, for our development goals, we could not spread ourselves thin by supporting multiple public cloud providers. Another reason is that most of our clients are using Office 365 and are Microsoft Azure clients themselves. Thus, it is more efficient for our solution and for the work that we perform, to be local to their existing applications/data. Finally, Microsoft Stack is something that we are already familiar with, and Azure being Microsoft, we felt it matched best with our knowledge and expertise.

Make sure you understand the cloud’s pricing model. Depending on your scenario, i.e., in rare cases, it may be more economical to do things on-premises.

Regarding some of the SaaS offerings in Azure, again, understand the pricing because it might make sense to leverage what they have as a service. In some cases, you may want to build it and manage it yourself.

Also, pay attention to which Azure Region you spin up compute and storage because the pricing can vary between regions and not all the offerings are equal across the regions.

I am a business development director who helps my clients by providing solutions during their digital transformation journey. I am a reseller of Microsoft Azure. My clients use this solution to host their data on the cloud and to have a secure database.

This is a very stable product.

I would like to see more automation and AI with the cloud to help the clients understand more about their clients, their data history, and their predictive analytics. This would help them better manage their clients.

I have been using this solution for almost four years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Some of my clients have thirty users while others have more than two hundred users.

We have received very good support from Azure here in Jordan.

The initial setup is quite complex and took about six months.

Azure may seem intimidating but you will get use to the product the more time that you spend working in it.

I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

It has multiple features that can be used from the start.

It is easy to use.

I would like to see support for the applications that are currently in place. Ideally, Microsoft Azure should be compatible with the applications that we are using in my environment.

I am not using Microsoft Azure, but I have been doing an assessment for the last five years.

I am using the latest version.

It's a stable product.

Microsoft Azure is a scalable solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

The installation is handled by another team. I was not involved in the installation of this solution.

As of now, there are no monthly or yearly subscription fees.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.