Microsoft Azure Reviews

I primarily used the solution for hypothetical cases. I used the solution to look at the 2019 active directory environment, some remote SQL storage, and storage access from on-premises to the cloud.

There's a feature for automated tasks. As an administrator, handling administrative-type tasks, it's quite useful. For example, I was spending lots of money when I would spin things up. I'd spin up a SQL server. I'd spin up different types of things. They cost a lot of money. I would get distracted, walk away, and go to bed. I'd get up in the morning, and I'd see I'd have a bill. Therefore, I spun up an automated task and wrote a PowerShell script, put it in an automated task, and it would run at seven o'clock every night, and delete all my resources. It saved me money.

You can build an environment in minutes. It's very good in terms of being an infrastructure as a service, and I found that really fascinating.

All the devices they have up there that replace existing devices in the real world like load balancers or F5 are helpful. I'm not sure how they relate or how they form compared to F5, or the firewalls compare to the ones that are in data centers, however, they looked all right to me.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales extremely well.

It's a bit of a mystery how the storage is going to perform. For example, when you've got a storage device like Hitachi or NetApp, you can run reports on that storage and you can do all this good stuff. I'm not sure if that's the case with Azure. A lot of the stuff is kind of proprietary, at the moment.

The cost is quite high.

You can't control the data as much as you would like to. When it's theirs, it's theirs. With Hitachi, Hitachi has its own policies. You can move data around based on how much it's used into lower-cost discs and whatnot. You might be able to do that with Azure. However, I can't verify that.

The initial setup is complex.

They need to make storage easy and offer more interconnectivity between solutions.

I've used the solution for about a year or so. Maybe a year and a half at most. It hasn't been that long.

In terms of stability, I've seen it go down twice now. They've had two problems with the active directory. That said, I would describe it as stable. They have different sites, regions, and whatnot, where you can move your data around in case you lose a data center or you lose a region. However, if you lose the active directory, that can take everything down.

It's not any more stable than an enterprise environment, to be honest. Maybe a little bit, however, if you lose a network connection to it, that's not stable.

I worked in a bank, a huge 50,000 employee enterprise. I saw their infrastructure go up and down about the same, once or twice a year. That's about the same as Azure, therefore, it's not anything different than an enterprise. You can make an enterprise resilient if you have lots of domain controllers and you do lots of redundant paths. 

The solution is very scalable. It's one of its great selling points. If a company needs to scale, it can do so with ease.

I've never been in touch with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

For a layperson or someone who is not trained, it wasn't an easy initial setup. It had some complexities.

I've personally gotten used to the process. The deployment, for example, wouldn't take that long now. While in the beginning, a deployment might take a month, now that I am more comfortable with the solution and more familiar, I can likely do it in a few days. 

That said, it depends on a company's plans and its own unique environment and complexities. It can vary. Most people seem to struggle with all of the connections they had before.

The number of people you need to deploy or maintain the solution really depends on the size of the environment. After implementation, you could probably scale back your employees from 10% to 50% with Azure.

I can handle an implementation myself. I'm getting better and faster at it.

I've found the cost to be a bit high. You also get dinged for extra things along the way.

The charges are also unpredictable. Even if you think something is a relatively static item, they'll charge you for it and it will change your expectation of the cost.

I've looked at other solutions, such as Hitachi and Netapp.

The biggest struggle a person would have these days, as an architect, is to determine what the cost-benefit of going to Azure would be rather than going to a storage device such as a Hitachi or a NetApp. Which has better value? What's going to be better in the next couple of years? You can really get screwed if you're going to be pulling data down from the cloud. If you pull a lot of data from the cloud, it's going to cost you. You don't get charged for putting it up. You get charged for pulling it down.

I basically used the solution to study.

I used a few different deployment models. I made an on-prem environment, Hyper-V environment, on my laptop and I connected it to the cloud.

I'd advise those considering the solution to not put all of their eggs in one basket. By that, I mean, it's a good idea to go hybrid and not full cloud. Going hybrid covers that network loss that you could suffer if you lose the network. If you lost a data center or a region, you could still have your on-prem server running an image of the cloud onsite.

I'd give the solution an eight out of ten. I haven't had a chance to study AWS or Google, however, I like this solution very much.

The primary use case of this solution is generally for infrastructure service, and also for VC-migrations and district modernization using the platform service. We're a consulting firm so we use this solution and also deploy it for our customers. I'm an architect/project manager and we are partners of Microsoft.

The main beneficial features the product provides are security, scalability, and elasticity.

The technical support could be improved. When we leave tickets, it can take some days before the issue is dealt with. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

We haven't had any issues with stability in the last 12 months, prior to that there were some small problems. 

The scalability is good, most of our clients are enterprise size organizations. 

The initial setup is straightforward, the environment is mature with a lot of documentation. 

The price of the solution is okay although it depends on the region of the deployment.

A company should look at the suitability for their use case before choosing a solution. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I primarily use Microsoft Azure for application development in our development environment.

The solution is pretty dynamic.

We prefer that we can configure our environment very quickly. 

We can add some notes if we need to. The testing capabilities are great. We can use the load balancing environment, and we can test a lot of different components from an infrastructure point of view. We can also test different scenarios within the application. 

The solution is very simple to use. It has a lot of great practical applications we really appreciate.

The licensing model is not ideal. It is not very useful in predicting actual costs. Sometimes we found that we could not accurately predict how much specific products will cost the company in the future. Just now, for example, we want to start using Log Analytics for Office 365, however, we don't know the final price. It's inconvenient for us as we cannot predict the budget and it puts off making a decision. For Microsoft, it's very disadvantagous.

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. If you could get something like logical groups of servers outside the mutual servers, it would be an improvement. 

Sometimes we want to start and do a penetration test. If, for example, we're planning new security scanning for our customers. You have to inform Microsoft that you want to start a penetration test. If you have regular scans Microsoft should allow regular scanning, without having to plan and to ask for approval from the Microsoft side every time. When it's meant to be a regular occurrence, it's very inconvenient for us.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. It doesn't cause bottlenecks or any other major issues for us. We find it to be reliable.

While we can dynamically add servers according to the user request, it's not profitable for us. Currently, it is possible to scale the solution. It just costs more to do so.

We are not so satisfied with technical support right now. Sometimes they cannot help us. We had problems with licensing and with the invoicing and so on and so on. Sometimes it's not very easy to explain the problems, the technical or non-technical, and they can't really assist us effectively.

In one instance, we had an issue with anti-spam on the service. We were trying to figure out why certain emails were being marked as spam. It took far too long to get to the bottom of the cause.

It's hard to gauge what the pricing will be, so It's hard to plan with the solution. The licensing needs to be more transparent and obvious.

We're simply Microsoft customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. We're mostly happy with it, although we would prefer if pricing was more transparent.

Implementation of Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, where we used Carbonite Availability as the primary tool and Microsoft Azure as secondary/target location.

Real-time replication configured from one point to another for business continuity and high availability. 

Altogether, there are eight servers in the local premise which are entirely replicated to the cloud. The kept cloud servers are idle until a disaster happens with the on-premise servers. The project setup was successful even with real-time testing. It was done with automatic failover and failback.  

It has improved our organization. 

It was very user-friendly when setting up the virtual machines and console. It was an easy task for my team to create virtual servers and start replications. 

We able to manage resources wisely with a third-party tool.  

It should have cost optimization tools. Customers are required to use third-party applications to avoid usage complications. Also, charging on downloads is not a good option, especially when it moves to a production server. 

Two years.

Achieving business continuity was a nightmare. Project was done for a supermarket chain where they kept one machine in every branch directly connected to remote data center. The connection was done using VDIs. Whenever there is glitch at the remote data center, the entire infrastructure was in trouble, which in turns affected the business a lot. Setting up a disaster recovery data center was an expensive plan and maintenance was too heavy. Connecting Carbonite Availability with Azure was an easy options, as it reduced overhead and maintenance.

Monthly billing convenience reduced cost overheads up to 70 percent.

We are going to use Microsoft Azure to move some on-premise servers into the cloud so that our data can be held there.

We are now trying to decide exactly this. Where can it improve our daily business?

Microsoft Azure can be pretty advanced and difficult to understand. I would like it to be simplified. The licensing especially needs to be simplified.

We have not been using Microsoft Azure for very long, about three months. My company has asked me to look for a better solution in terms of security perspective. They have asked me to technically go through to see if there is a real need to change or not, and what the new features are.

The stability of Microsoft Azure has been very good from what we have seen.

I have not actually gone through the initial setup yet. So I am trying to figure that out. They want me to go through the training so I can understand the setup.

So far we are satisfied with the pricing of Microsoft Azure.

We are also looking into other platforms. Perhaps an open-source platform.

I would rate Microsoft Azure at an eight out of a scale of ten.

We host various sites and utilize this solution for purchasing domains as well. It's simple to host small sites and back-end software applications on Azure instead of on regional servers

It has great deals of APIs for automation that we can utilize for managing our services. We implemented some custom tools that were developed in house and are extremely happy with the time that we now spend monitoring the websites.

Azure has the best website amongst all cloud computing platforms. It is simple to utilize, and one can release nearly anything, from app services to host sites.

Being a big item, it has it's own share of bugs. I had a great deal of difficulty establishing the account at first.

No

No

We are at 150% at this time, not considering the time that we concentrated on something else.

Yes, we searched Google and Amazon.

App Service is the most valuable feature because it is very simple to configure compared to the other services.

Almost all of our services to the customer are run on Azure such as the video.metricarts.com.

Viewing the expenses for each service in the Azure Portal is difficult for novices to understand; this could improve.

It's a great platform, but its visual interface is sometimes difficult to understand.

I have used this solution for four years.

Azure is very stable with its services, I have never had problems with its stability.

Most services allow you to scale easily, but you have to understand the necessary resources before scaling.

Technical support is good, they usually respond on the same day that one asks them a question. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

I've always used Azure.

The setup isn't complex; on the contrary, in less than 15 minutes I was already using Azure.

Before using any of Azure's services, investigate their prices, and in some cases, use the free plans that are available.

I evaluated the Amazon AWS option, but the simplicity of creating services was better in Azure.

Understand the scope of each service and its limitations, to avoid problems after execution.

• Quick and easy deployment
• Complete packaged solutions to deploy (Web Apps service)
• Clear pricing
• Low cost
• Easy scaling
• Cost effectiveness (stopping a VM when not in use)
• High availability
• Easy restore and recovery
• Integration with Active Directory and Office 365. There are many benefits. For example, there is a special customized portal for all apps and services built in Azure AD (myapps.microsoft.com) with a seamless single sign-on experience for the users in AD or Office 365.

It improved our project completion time. A new server or solution requirements are now solved in hours instead of in weeks.

What we experienced after two years with an Azure suscription is that there is good knowledge in Microsoft Partners for Azure, but generally they are too specialized and couldn't cover everything, because they allways miss something related by example to networking, database, web apps, security, or integration on Azure. So you must contract more than one Microsoft Partner to have a successful project in Azure.

I have been using Azure for two years.

We had no stability issues.

It is very easy and quick to scale up or scale out. It has automatic scaling by CPU performance or other rules.

Support is very good, fast, responsive, and effective.

We used traditional on-premises virtual machines and switched to Azure for better cost and faster deployment.

The only complexity was the initial setup of a site-to-site VPN to connect our LAN to Azure. The required Azure site-to-site VPN gateway is not fully supported on older firewalls, so you must be careful. For details please read: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...

Azure’s price is very competitive with traditional hosting (in-house or outsourced). Windows and database licenses are included in the solution price or you can bring your own license (BYOL). There are also several free or open source solutions in Azure.

We looked at AWS. In our case, Microsoft had very competitive pricing due to our Office 365 agreement.

Test it for free with the advice of an experienced Microsoft partner.