Microsoft Azure Reviews

We have been using Azure for DevOps and non-production environments. It is great when you want to deploy apps in your staging environment first using deployment slots. This allows you to flick the switch very quickly between your current prod app and the newly developed in staging to see how it behaves in the real world. If something goes wrong, you can easily switch it back.

Azure is a platform which allows our organization to be agile. It very quickly provisions servers, infrastructure, and apps on the fly and complies with security requirements and data safety.

Azure Active Directory, Azure VMs, Azure network security groups (NSG), and  monitoring endpoints across different regions to check how your platform operates from different geographic locations. Azure backups are another feature which are quite useful, especially since they allow us to backup our Azure VMs and our on-premise servers. Data can be backed up to Azure, saving time, space, and using clunky tapes to restore data, when needed.

Azure ARM console can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning. 

If you are not aware of costs, pricing, etc., you can end up with a hefty bill. However, I found that the Azure price calculator is a valuable tool to use before starting to deploy VMs in Azure. This tool will give you an overview of the costs you should expect on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

I have had no stability issues. It is a very stable platform and very resilient. It comes down how you set up your geo-redundant options for backups, SQL replication. and VMs which run your services/apps.

I have had no scalability issues. It is an elastic platform. It all depends how you set up your scale up options to address heavy loads, but the options are there for you to use.

Microsoft Premier support is great to deal with. They understand very quickly the scenarios and how critical a scenario can be. They provide info, support, and knowledge to address issues. 

We did not have a particular issue when implementing. It was mostly understanding all the options Azure had. We used Premier support to generate inquiries with Microsoft seeking clarification about what option was best suited for what we wanted to do.

I used AWS (Amazon Web Services), but mostly because I was involved in a project. AWS is also a great solution, but I found Azure was easier to use and it had a native integration with my current platform (Windows).

The key here is design. You need to design and orchestrate how you want your VMs (geo-redundant, in an availability set, size of VMs, etc.). It is the key to understanding the costs of each set of VMs available to you in terms of size and computing resources. Also, understand what type of storage will be required for you to deploy your virtual infrastructure SSD storage and larger disks. Plan to use this (Standard, Basic, or Premium) and it needs to be taken into consideration depending of what you want to use Azure for.

In-house deployment, as there were Azure skills on the team.

Not applicable.

Use Azure price calculator before embarking on an Azure deployment. This will help you understand straight away what your cost expectations are on a regular basis. You can always run Azure on a 30 day trial, see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage.

In addition to AWS, I also trialed Oracle Cloud (on a smaller scale) and it is great if you are running Oracle Databases. You can also stand up your VMs and build your environment. A cool feature of Oracle Cloud is you can run a private cloud version in your data center, exactly the same experience if you are running it on a private or public cloud. The private cloud solution comes in the form of an Oracle appliance which gets configured, deployed and installed by Oracle directly in your data center.

Run Azure on a 30 day trial and see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage. You see the reason when you view the benefits of using its cloud solution, especially one that integrates so seamlessly with your environment, collaboration tools, and apps.

I use a virtual machine for remote desktop and Microsoft Azure is user-friendly.

Microsoft Azure could improve by having more virtual machine operating systems available.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately three years.

I have found Microsoft Azure to be stable.

The scalability of Microsoft Azure is very good.

We have approximately 25 companies that are using the solution. I do not know how many users are using the solution, but it would be a high number.

Microsoft Azure overall is an expensive solution.

In general, if you compare Amazon AWS with the price of Microsoft Azure host cloud service, Microsoft Azure is more expensive than Amazon AWS. I didn't see any hidden costs.

My advice to first-time users of Microsoft Azure would be for them to go through certification training. This way they would be able to understand what they are doing. Without certification, it would be difficult to understand how the system is working.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

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.

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 primarily use the solution for backups and ASO.

The ASO is great.

We enjoy the disaster recovery aspect of the solution, which is very interesting, as we pay when it is on. When it's off we don't pay. 

There is no effort investment. We just pay what is being replicated, that's all.

There is the potential to scale.

The stability is good.

We've found the technical support to be responsive. 

In a month, there is a plan to increase pricing, which is something we are not looking forward to.

We've worked with the solution since it was first released. We've used it for a while.

The product is very stable compared to if you are going to employ it in-house. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. t's reliable. 

The scalability is good. If you need to expand it, you can.

We are in Mauritius. Mauritius is a very small country. We have about 1.2 million inhabitants. We are not that big of a country. I have about 25 clients using it.

We are an indirect reseller. We do have the CSP, the cloud service provider, in Mauritius, with whom we purchase. When we have an issue, we deal with them. They do have engineers that provide support as well.

That said, if there are any big troubles then we contact Microsoft directly. So far, our experience has been very positive. The callback is within 20 minutes. It's fine.

The initial setup is not simple. You need to be trained. It's not like it's just ready to be implemented - you need to be trained in what you are doing.

The deployment is quick and only takes about one day.

We do get an ROI from the disaster recovery aspect of the solution. 

The pricing is great, as we only pay for what we use. 

That said, the prices are about to increase in the next month.

We do have some clients in South Africa and some clients in Germany, however, we've noticed that the pricing for Germany is less expensive than South Africa. South Africa has a new data center, which is likely why the price is a bit high.

We implement the solution. We are silver resellers. 

We are using the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I generally, use Microsoft Azure for storage and to have applications running, such as the Microsoft Suite without having to have a physical desktop or hardware. I could use it wherever I want. I could use it from a tablet, instead of having all that files on a tablet, you can have it stored, saved, everything right there in Azure.

The best feature in Microsoft Azure is that I don't have to change computers. I don't have to upgrade or if something breaks or a hard drive crashes. The lack of a physical aspect is the major feature for me.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately two years.

Microsoft Azure is stable.

I do not have to worry about scalability because I do not have users other than myself. However, it is scalable.

I have not had the need to contact the support, I have not any issues.

The installation was easy.

By using Microsoft Azure you can save money from not having to purchase or maintain infrastructure.

The price of the solution could be reduced. There should be a loyalty cost reduction model. If customers have been using the service year after year they should receive a discount.

I would advise those thinking about using Microsoft Azure to try it out, especially for businesses. If you know that your office might be moving, instead of having all the cost of physical hardware to either get rid of or repurchase, the cost of the subscription is going to be a lot less than moving all your physical servers, storage devices, and computers. You won't have any maintenance, the need to worry about hardware breaking, hardware crashing, or people breaking any of the hardware. The workstations and connectivity are all they would need to worry about if they decided to move from one spot to the other.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

We are resellers. We use Microsoft to provide a service to our customers.

We offer SaaS software for the marketplace. 

We offer SaaS software for the B2B marketplace and provide solutions to our customers through public cloud infrastructure.

We have yet to explore this solution and what it has to offer because we are still in the transformation phase from Amazon to Azure.

It could be more open to external solutions.

Integration with other ecosystems would be beneficial. During this transitional period, this is our primary concern. For example, when we offer solutions to our customers, we must connect to their IT ecosystem, which we are unable to do in some cases.

A good strategy would be to include a feature for integrating with external ecosystems.

We would also like to improve the security.

We switched from Amazon to Azure six months ago.

In the short time that we have been using this solution, it appears to be stable enough for our needs.

We work with 50 companies that use this solution on a daily basis.

We have no issues with the technical support. It's fine.

We needed to find someone who could help us. It depends on the support contract you have with Microsoft. 

The standard level of support was obviously insufficient for us, and we had to resort to a more advanced level of support for partners who had complex technical questions. This meant that there would be some additional support costs, but everything would be fine once you made that decision.

We use Auth0, which is an IAM-based solution.

We are using an identification solution provided by a cloud provider. We are based on Azure. We work with a Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and we use the solution provided by Microsoft to authenticate the users.

It is easy to install.

It took us a few months to deploy. I did not take a lot of time to move to Azure but moving to another infrastructure using microservice takes longer.

We are coming from a moderate approach to installation and going for a modular one that is based on microservices.

To be able to manage the microservices, we made some modifications.

The length of time it took to complete the implementation was primarily due to changes we made to the infrastructure that was required for our customers.

We have a dedicated team of ten people who will deploy and manage the infrastructure.

We have a separate Dev team for the application itself.

Customers pay for our software and use our solution as a service through monthly payments. They don't pay the licensing fee directly to Microsoft.

We provide a solution as a service to our customers. They pay us for our services, which are based on Microsoft.

We would recommend this solution to others who are considering using it.

I would rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.