Microsoft Azure Reviews

We use the product for Exchange, Microsoft Intune, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

The solution is secure and easy to use. It meets the security guidelines. It is approved by the state and the shareholders. MFA is a good feature. The reporting features are also good. The management and the logging of incidents are good. It’s a good solution for our use cases. I don't have any negative opinions about it.

Sometimes, I need better support. Microsoft must acknowledge support cases for the product. There have been some data leak issues lately. The support team is not responding to my emails. I had a call with an engineer on a weekend, and he told me he would follow up on Monday, but he hasn’t shown up yet.

I have been using the solution for one and a half years.

The tool is 99.99% stable.

The tool is scalable. We have 50 to 100 employees. We're a startup, but we are growing.

Overall, the support team is good.

Neutral

The tool was easy to install. The maintenance is fairly easy. When I have issues, I contact Microsoft, and the team helps me.

The tool is cheap.

We are not allowed to store data in Azure. Our data is encrypted via third-party software. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft Azure for many different services. For example, we use the Azure Boards for work and issue tracking. The Azure Repos is a place we store code, it is similar to a Git repository for us. Microsoft Azure has pipelines for the deployment of your applications across environments. There are different cloud services for different use cases in Microsoft Azure that I interact with on a daily basis.

Microsoft Azure has benefited our organization mostly because we moved all our infrastructure to the cloud. That has helped with cost optimization. We don't have to worry about operational maintenance for things such as patching or updates for any of the servers because everything is handled by the cloud itself. We are always using the latest version.

Microsoft Azure has hundred of services that they offer on the platform.

The Microsoft Azure platform in itself is very good. The documentation that is available I find very handy and the community behind it is helpful. If you have any problems or anything, you can easily reach Microsoft's community, and then there would be someone who would be willing to help. That's a very good plus point for Microsoft Azure.

There are times when using a service in Microsoft Azure can be confusing because you have four or five options that do similar operations. It would be helpful if there was a clear decision tree around those features. Microsoft does provide a lot of decision trees around a lot of their services, but it's not for everything.

This would be helpful for the users because sometimes it gets confusing what to use, what not to use. Then you start with something, and then after two months, you think you should have used something else. There are approximately 200 services and I have found this issue with approximately 10 of them.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately seven years.

Microsoft Azure is stable, I did not encounter any issues or anything in the platform. The uptime is very good. 

When you design your solution, you can make sure that everything is accounted for in your design, such as all the options are there. Microsoft Azure in itself is rarely down. If there is a complete blackout it can happen, but normally no. It's very reliable.

The scalability of Microsoft Azure is unlimited. You never have to be concerned with scalability. You only have to pay for it and then the scaling is available for you.

I have approximately 50 to 100 people using this solution in my organization. I use the solution on a daily basis.

I have not needed to contact the technical to Microsoft in my current experience. In the past, I have contacted Microsoft once or twice, but the process is straightforward. You raise a ticket, and then Microsoft's people reach out to you.

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure is very straightforward. You don't have to do any setup. You only have to sign up on the Microsoft Portal, and then you can start using it.

I did the implementation of Microsoft Azure myself.

There is not any maintenance required for this solution. If we build any solution on top of Microsoft Azure, then that's something that we have to take care of and maintain. The Microsoft Azure platform in itself does not need any maintenance from us.

Microsoft Azure is not expensive. You pay for what you use. If you are using it everything could be expensive.

We choose Microsoft Azure after doing the proper comparisons and proof of concepts. We did a complete pros and cons list for our vendor selection process.

I would highly recommend Microsoft Azure to others.

I would advise others that one of the most important points to make is to make sure that the security and governance of the platform have been thought of before you start building everything around it. Make sure you build your security framework and the governance framework around the platform that suits your company. Every company is different. Everyone will have different security and governance rules.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

I am a technology consultant and pre-sales cloud solution architect.

These are the features I have found most valuable with Azure. For any particular cloud world, when we talk about the cloud computing model, it is all about agility, availability, how you are trying to scale up your environment, how you're providing high availability, your disaster recovery mechanism, and what is the service availability matrix that you're following? We then talk about the workloads which are being supported on the Microsoft platform. Then we come to the commercial side of those workloads. For example, if we are trying to migrate the Windows workload, then Microsoft Azure offers a lot of benefits for Windows and SQL licenses. We can include that in the picture while we are trying to draw a comparison between different providers. Because AWS does not provide that DAM facility, though there is something that they provide, but you need to put it on the installs, not on RDS. Make it easy to install.

The second thing about Azure is that if we talk about Gartner, IDC and Forrester, although AWS is leading the chart in the leader's quadrant, when we look at the recent growth and what companies are acquiring and how much business they are pulling in year to year, there is a greater spike in the Microsoft Azure growth as compared to AWS.

I have worked as a cloud solution architect in India and Microsoft Azure works on data centers. They have three different geographical locations where they put the data centers. So as per the ISO 27001 BSI compliance for DR, disaster recovery mechanism, you need to make sure that the primary and secondary data centers are separated by a geographical zone - which Microsoft Azure adheres to. That definitely makes it a good choice for the client who wants the data to be in India and to also follow the BSI compliance.

Other factors include the Azure Site Recovery. The ASR one-stop DR solution provides RPO and RTO. It also gives you failover and failback scenarios. AWS did not have that kind of platform earlier. They had DM, DMS and SMS for small scale and medium scale app and database migration, but they didn't have a one-stop DR solution. They recently acquired cloud in their platform. Microsoft Azure also recently acquired cloud. They have built that particular platform into their Azure Migrate, which is their cloud feasibilities function provider. If we need to do a feasibility assessment or dependency mapping, we can use that particular tool or the Azure Migrate. It's a very good tool. I use that tool for multiple things.

I am trying to draw a comparison between the two leading cloud providers.

When we try to do backup scenarios, Azure Site Recovery is supported with all kinds of platforms. But it is not capable when you are trying to do recovery of a database or a recovery of an application server which are already on HA, high availability. HA would mean that you have only done the clustering. If there was clustering there, then definitely the ASR does not support it. But if you don't have HA, if you don't have the clustering done, then definitely ASR would be supported in that particular scenario. You can also do big database migrations with the Azure Site Recovery if there is a single database. Otherwise, you can use native database solutions to migrate them to cloud. For example, SQL Enterprises uses the Always On, where you introduce a new machine into the clustering. Then you try to put that as a secondary, and then you migrate.

Otherwise, if you have SQL Standard, then you can use a log sheet mechanism, which can be used to migrate the data. For SAP HANA, you can use HSR, HANA Service Replication, and for Oracle you can use the Data Guard, the negative solutions supported, but definitely Azure is doing that, as well. When we talk about a typical DR scenario, the cost that you are giving within Microsoft Azure would be storage, then the Azure Site Recovery cost, and then the network readiness. Microsoft Azure is an optimized solution when we compare it to any other particular cloud solution.

In terms of what could be improved with Azure, I would like to see something like what Google has created with their cross-platform solution, Anthos. I would like to see some features like Anthos has. Secondly, there are multiple DevOps solutions and tools available in Microsoft Azure, but most of the time they are either in the build mode, meaning you don't get complete support for them because they are either making changes, or changing the names of the particular services. Sometimes, services vanish from the portal. We are not able to see that. I think they actually change the names of the services.

For example, they had advanced data analytics in Office 365. They actually removed it and they now include all those features in Windows Defender. 

One more thing that I would like to say is that AWS works on availability zones. You have multiple availability zones in a particular region, which means that in that particular region you have more than one data center. If any of their single data centers fail, they can do a failover to the next immediate data center, which is in the same region. But in the case of Azure, if the data center fails for one particular region, they need to do a failover to different region altogether, which is separated by a geographical distance. That will be a kind of DR scenario.

Microsoft should focus on the higher availability of data centers where they can have more than one data center in a single region. I think they have implemented that kind of solution in the USA. They are going to do it soon in Europe and other countries as well, but it still is an upcoming feature. It's not completely built. They need to build that. 

The second thing which I feel regarding Microsoft Azure in India, is that they have less case studies when we talk about SAP on Azure as compared to SAP on AWS. There are fewer numbers of case studies on the portal. You can't find any. Whereas when you go into the India section for AWS, you will find plenty in terms of SAP and cloud.

Case studies are not there. If you have case studies, good case studies of large banks or any kind of government sectors, those case studies would definitely help to build customer trust on that particular platform.

There is one more thing which I would like to talk about in terms of costing. When you talk about AWS, they have three different types of costing models - partial upfront, no upfront, and all upfront. Azure has two models, all up front and no upfront. But also in these costing models, AWS has multiple other payment modes in terms of one-year or three-year. Azure does not have that. It lacks that particular costing mechanism, which it needs so there are more costing models. There is a lack of pricing flexibility, and I would like to see more costing models and licensing.

The third thing I would like to say, is that Azure was pretty bad in terms of the recent service off-time for Microsoft Azure and AWS. They didn't complete 99.99% of service they provide to the customers as compared to AWS. AWS data centers have also gone out recently, I think, four or five service interruptions, but definitely Azure should be keeping that in mind. I think with the help of clustering data centers in a single region, they can achieve that.

I do not want to take any credit away from Azure or AWS, but definitely Anthos is a big plus point for DCP. Azure should also build that kind of platform. Secondly, they can work on creating more data centers to build the regional availability,  which AWS already has across geography. The third thing they can work on is their costing models and the RI models - make them a bit more flexible for the client.

I have been working on Azure for the past seven years.

Regarding stability, Azure is doing well in terms of IES portfolio. They need to progress on the implementation of more data centers in a single region, which would increase their service level agreement by a little. They definitely need to work on their DevOps services. AWS' DevOps services are pretty good. If you go into ratings, the leading raters or the leading magazines, Forrester or Gartner or IDC, rate AWS services much higher compared to Azure. So, they need to increase on their service.

The third thing on the stability factor is that they publish more cases on the core infrastructure migration, the mission critical applications like SAP migration or Apple migrations. Putting the case studies on the portal would alleviate the doubt that Azure is stable. Azure is stable, but the case studies have to be there to support that.

When we talk about scale and scale out mechanisms, this works pretty seamlessly in Azure. For example, if I need to use the spot instances that AWS has (spot instances are those instances which are actually created at times when you need a high memory or a high CPU for some time) you can configure a spot instance and the spot instance occurs, and it does the load checkpoint. Azure does the same thing with scaling out. However, one thing regarding RI is that AWS does not support that, but when I am in a particular RI, for example my family is the DS series, I am in DS3 or DS4, if I want to scale up, I can scale up with the same RI, but if I need to scale down, I cannot scale down unless I remove that RI and create a new one. I cannot scale into a different family altogether.

Cross-family scaling is not there. Cross-family scaling would help because sometimes being on cloud machines which are in RI, those machines have been used for one year and are currently a very small application host or they are hosting applications or IA services, etc... Now, that particular application has been, or is getting decommissioned, and the company wants to leave the same RI machines for a different application altogether for which they want that particular application to perform on a higher computer issue. For that particular thing I need to cancel that RI and with the remaining my budget, and with the call deduction that Microsoft does, I need to purchase a new RI. If the cross-family RI is there, then it is definitely smoother, and the priority won't be there. So, it will not be an economic blow for the company.

When you open a normal case, Azure has a response matrix. They don't have a resolution matrix - at what particular time that will be resolved. The maximum resolution matrix is not there. But when we talk about the premium support, then Azure has a response matrix and a resolution matrix, and they also have the escalation matrix.

When I was working in Progressive Infotech, we had the advanced support subscription with Microsoft Azure Support. We were given multiple hours of advanced support. We were also provided with other things. I felt then that when you're opening a support ticket, and the support ticket priority is less or if the ticket that you opened is not in the premium bracket, the resolution will be late and the support matrix won't follow the time. They have a response. I think the response matrix is there for basic support and for advanced support. Premium support has the resolution matrix, as well. But the support center needs to have a service level agreement, which has the response matrix, the resolution matrix, and escalation matrix. That will build more trust from the partners in the OEM. AWS actually does not have that, but their response and resolution are pretty good because all the cases that you open in AWS are paid.

Azure materials are pretty good compared to AWS, or any other platform materials. Azure has multiple platforms, and MS Learn is where you can learn about the platforms and the services. Then you have Docs.Microsoft.com, which you can use as a troubleshoot document or understanding of how to implement that solution. With the help of Microsoft Azure, the Microsoft platform, you have multiple types of cases which you can open in the Microsoft Portal. The premium cases are there. Then you have support cases, as well. Azure is pretty good there. Their support matrix is pretty good. The materials are there, the support matrix is there. So, that is pretty good.

Microsoft Azure has multiple levels that an organization can take. Once they had the silver, bronze and the gold partnerships, and in terms of the productivity there is the Office 365 suite or the Azure suite, and they have specialty certifications, as well. You have the premium certifications. If you are also providing support to the client, then as a manager you can join Microsoft as an expert MSP. I think there are 50 or 55 in the country. It started at 15, and it grew to 55. Because many companies who are putting out tenders or an RFP or RFQ, mention in the PQ criteria that the partner should be MSP certified.

It would definitely help. It would act as a USP for you because there are multiple companies in India, more than hundreds and hundreds of companies in India and outside India. The customer would know the first company which is an expert MSP and the Microsoft partners would also give the lead to those export MSPs. Currently, you can also elevate the level by being on a fast track team, which is a one-stop team for Microsoft implementation and support for the Office 365 platform. The fast track team can be a very good asset because you can get a faster certification and then you сan be on the fast track board. You can actually make money when you do a successful implementation or support for a particular client. So the value is there.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Microsoft Azure an eight.

We use this solution for single sign-on authentication.

We like that you sign in only once and that grants access to all of the Microsft applications, as well as others such as ServiceNow and SAP Concur.

Ease of use could be improved. You wouldn't just be able to use this solution without being trained on it.

We have Microsoft Azure for approximately five years.

We are always updating Microsoft.

It's been pretty stable. There have only been one or two instances where Microsoft went down. One time, it was the building's main operations center that was struck by lightning and caught on fire.

We have 20,000 users in our organization who are using this solution.

As we acquire other companies, we will increase the usage.

Technical support needs improvement. If you are able to get a rep then it's great. If not, you are left hanging.

Previously, we used Okta.

We switched over because we got the Enterprise package with Microsoft Suite.

The initial setup was completed by our internal Microsoft team.

Microsoft Azure definitely provides us with a return on investment.

Licensing costs for Enterprise are on an annual basis. In addition, we pay to have Gartner help us negotiate.

It is best to have a dedicated team because it is not easy to use and get set up or to get acclimatized in the amount of training that you need to become familiar with the solution.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

The performance of Azure DevOps services is really impressive. It really demonstrates the value of the service. 

We've had a good experience with their technical support. They are always available when needed.

I haven't been involved with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services, but I hope there will be more training sessions for them. Other companies and platforms provide technical webinars and training on their websites. 

I wish I could learn more about CI/CD, but the resources aren't readily available. I haven't been able to find webinars or training sessions. Maybe I'm not searching correctly, or the information isn't presented clearly.

The price should be lower. My company used the demo product because of the cost. Price is an important point for all clients and companies who want to obtain this solution.

I also have a question: what about review platforms for forensic technology? Is there a way to integrate these platforms with Azure? It would be great to have a web-based review platform integrated with Azure. Currently, we use a third-party software to launch this review platform.  Is there any way to review documents within a web-based solution in Azure? This is something I wonder about.

I've used Azure for a year and a half, specifically for DevOps services. Unfortunately, I worked with a demo product, as the company couldn't purchase the actual product. I mainly used Azure DevOps repos and some basic concepts like Azure state plans.

Azure solutions are stable. Many companies find clients who want the solutions because of the stability and high performance.

It's a good solution for small or medium-sized businesses.

The setup is very straightforward. The Azure services and platform for storage are easy to understand, with clear steps. It's easy for any user to install services on the platform.

I haven't had any issues with integrating Azure services. We use the integration services with Azure with a very intuitive UI. So, I didn't face any issues while integrating Azure services.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. There are a lot of benefits. The integration options for all services are great.

We use the solution for hosting business applications and the test environment.

The compliance is really good. It provides visibility of our top risks and recommendations on how to close them. Sentinel is really good from a security standpoint. The product provides a host of security tools. We deploy and configure everything ourselves. So far, we have not had any issues related to Azure.

The solution must improve its pricing.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

I rate the stability of the tool a nine and a half out of ten.

The tool is highly scalable, depending on the design. I've not had any issues. We have to factor in cost and design. About 2000 people use the solution in our organization. It is extensively used in our organization. Based on business growth, we might increase the number of users.

We had some technical issues. The support team was ready to support us once we raised a ticket. They responded in a reasonable time and escalated the issue when necessary.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The information is readily available, and there are many local partners who are extremely supportive. Deployment is just a matter of getting the login set up. It was pretty fast.

Our in-house team had been trained to deploy the tool, so they knew what to do. We have a few trained cloud admins who can manage the product. There are a lot of automation options, so they don't need a big crowd to work with it.

The product has a good ROI. It depends on how we handle the cost based on resource creation and the data we build based on our setup.

We have a licensing option from our partner in which the solution is bundled up with a whole host of other services. There are no additional costs associated with the product.

It is one of the best tools in the market. It's a very good cloud service. It has a lot of good security options. The reporting options are also good. The on-premise AD is fantastic. The tool gives us flexibility in deployment. If we get the design wrong, that's not Azure’s problem. It's our problem. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I work for a Naval Shipyard. We build fighter ships for fighter aircraft. The Navy is our sponsor. Everything that we do is Navy or Navy-related. A lot of what we do is classified; however, I can say that we do some robotic AI work. 

Microsoft is our corporate authentication piece, so everything has to authenticate to Microsoft Azure. Everything in the whole entire company has to authenticate there. Even if you're building something, you have to be leading up to the point where it's going to authenticate to Microsoft. They are the vendor of choice, as far as authentication, but they're not the vendor of choice as far as all things at the shipyard. 

Our entire organization uses this solution. Size-wise, we're similar to a small city.

No features really stand out in particular. The reason that we use Microsoft Azure is that Microsoft has left us no choice — that's what I would say. If you use Microsoft, you've been curtailed in your on-prem data center. There are certain things we can do with Azure on-prem that we can't do on the cloud. We're now fully in the cloud. But even most of the Office products, which are in Office 365, are still on-prem. I came to this company to do cloud, but the company isn't ready to go to the cloud. It sounds like upper management is going to be changing some of the business structures. The better information I can give upper management, as far as our features and capabilities, will help them to make better business decisions. That's kind of where I am currently.

The support, the cost, the way they have the tiers, this could all be improved. For example, our company has been purchasing Microsoft Office 365 cloud licensing for approximately five years, and we do not have any production. We have five divisions and these divisions have different classification and levels of data. This company has changed hands over the years. We now lead the was as far as IT, but the corporate office didn't do a top-down infrastructure. It's a long story, but the way that we do things is not the way that everybody else does things. Just because others are moving to XYZ doesn't mean we're going to go there today. We might look and see how everybody else is doing everything, and once we decide we're ready to go, then we'll go. It might be 10 years later. It might be next week, but we don't follow the crowd. We follow the Navy.

I have been working with Microsoft since the very beginning.

Although I am not the administrator, there are some things that are kind of quirky. The biggest problem is that we're a really, really, really big SharePoint user. Everything that's 100% SharePoint online, is not a one-for-one into the SharePoint that we have on-prem. 

Security is a problem, that's why we only allow web products for Office 365. SharePoint doesn't give us everything that we need. These are a few of the drawbacks for us.

Scalability is complex, but only because our company is complex.

Support depends. For the professional services, they're usually pretty good.

For other divisions, the support hasn't been that good. Anytime we have problems and we try to ask for support, what we paid for is one thing and what we're getting is another thing. Because of this, we often have to renegotiations with Microsoft. 

The initial setup is very complex because we're a complex corporation.

The review board has actually approved all of the Microsoft Office 2016 products and applications. We have the licenses, however, we're not using them.

Teams is the one collaborative product that everybody wants to use. We've approved Microsoft Teams on the web only. Because of our security constraint, we don't want our users to use every feature that's actually on Teams. We don't want to allow third-party vendors to use that application in order to get into our environment. 

For example, you can share your screen, but I can't share my screen. I can share an application if it's been approved, but I can't share my screen. The only way I can actually talk to you is if we talk about topical issues that you would read about in the newspaper or something like that. I can't tell you anything that's company proprietary.

Right now we're looking at Microsoft TFS, Azure on DevOps. However, all of the features have to be configured by someone. It's not that ADO can't do it, it's just that it would take a lot of time — we'd have to have someone physically come in and do it. That would require Microsoft Professional Services which costs a lot of money. Often, people can just buy stuff off the shelf when they want to use another product. For example, all the ALM tools actually integrate with TFS. So, if we have a product that already has that capability, why are we purchasing those new products? Why are we doing a POC for that? So that's what kind of hat I wear here.

If you're interested in going with Microsoft, my advice would be to do it. Everybody's using Microsoft.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

The problem is that I'm an old Microsoft engineer. I like to build it the way I want to build it.  I don't want it to be SaaS. I liked the fact that you could build your servers in the AWS environment and build out the servers the way you want. They're actually taking away a lot of the applications. More and more companies are switching to SaaS or IAS, etc.

Now, the structure is going towards SaaS. I think I have a three-year lifecycle on my licenses and then I will have to drop or either migrate my data to SaaS. It's probably cheaper for people to go that way, but it gives you less flexibility. There's probably more security, but you're depending on the vendor's security or however they have that set up. You lose a lot of your flexibility when you go into SaaS.

We are using the solution as a cloud environment. 

The solution is user-friendly and compatible. 

The platform should be available at the same price worldwide. 

I have been using Microsoft Azure for the past 5 years. 

 I don't see any major bugs in the cloud environment.

Two hundred people are using the solution at present.

They are quick to solve issues. 

Positive

Microsoft provides very easy documentation, for each and every resource. So there is a very clear documentatio. It is very easy to install and start up with the cloud environment.

The pricing is cheap. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.