Microsoft Azure Reviews

We use Azure for a variety of services and we are in the process of configuring everything. We use GoDaddy to host our domain, and then we provision from GoDaddy for services such as email. This is one of the things that I just recently configured.

Right now, we're in the process of setting up the firewall. This provides us with security for the website. Firewalls are something that I have a lot of experience with because, in my previous organization, I dealt with audits and other similar tasks that depend on security.

The most valuable feature of Azure is the flexibility to pick and choose what you need, on the spot, and then be able to manage it yourself.

In Azure, everything is pretty straightforward. Once you know it, the platform is very easy to use.

The training material that they have is very good, and it's easy to understand.

Most of the problems that we've had are related to the DNS and the SSL certificate. Those two things have been a real pain. Sometimes, it happens because of GoDaddy and sometimes it happens because of Azure. Either we make a change in GoDaddy and the configuration is lost, or our developers make a change to the website and from there it gets lost.

It would be helpful if Azure provided more information on the various add-ons to give people an understanding of what they are used for, and how they're applied by other companies or businesses. One downside is that I find myself signing up and paying for things that I don't really need, and I have to call them to find out exactly what it is that I'm paying for. For example, I recently added the Azure Data Studio and I don't know what I need it for. I see that it can create a connection and run a query but I don't know if I'm going to be using it. That said, I will probably need it in the future.

My current organization has been using Microsoft Azure for the past two months. I have extensive past experience with it.

Stability-wise, it has been fine.

Azure is a scalable platform.

I have not been in contact with technical support myself. In fact, we have not had to reach out to them very often. We generally figure out things on our own but we also have an IT contract with personnel to work to resolve issues when they occur. Technical issues are something that you always want to try to resolve yourself.

Although we haven't had any problems that we couldn't resolve, we know that if we have to call technical support then we're going to be on hold for a while. This is something we don't want and can avoid by having our own IT support contract.

In my previous job, I worked for large telecom and we used a variety of products. These included AWS, as well as Azure, and we also had our own cloud that we leased to third parties.

I received training and certification on both Azure and AWS. However, I did not have much opportunity to use AWS.

In my current company, we migrated the business from AWS to Azure within the last two months.

The initial setup for me was easy because I have experience with Azure, as well as AWS, and a private cloud in my previous organization. I was in the internal network group, and I had all of the operational responsibilities for that area.

We were able to set it up and get it working in a day.

Migrating to Azure from AWS was not a big deal.

The price of this solution is one of the things that attracted us to it.

We considered both Azure and AWS for my current company. When we began, the company already had an existing website running with AWS, but I had more experience with Azure. We did extensive research to compare the two and we found that Azure was definitely the way to go.

We were already using several other Microsoft products, which means that our environment is more compatible using Azure.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Azure is to look at the training materials that they have available. They are very easy to understand and I recommend running through the ones that pertain to your use cases. A lot of the time, it will have the additional information that is needed to understand the problem and help you to find the relevant information in other sources. For example, it contained information about GoDaddy that was relevant to our environment.

The biggest thing is that the information is all there and a lot of people don't like to look, but I suggest using the help and the instructional videos before calling somebody else. Everything is available.

I would rate this 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. 

I use the solution in my company to virtualize apps that haven't quite become SaaS products yet. My organization gets to deal with travel-based companies, mining companies, and logistics companies that have software on which their business runs, for whom we need to put such software tools into a cloud instance because there are no current SaaS offerings in the market. My company tends to host certain software products on Azure and then deploy such solutions through Azure Virtual Desktop.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is a quite cheap tool compared to any other private cloud offerings. It makes good commercial sense to have Microsoft Azure when you compare it to an on-premises infrastructure.

The permissions and controls in the product are not easy to use. From an improvement perspective, the permissions and controls in the product need to be made easier. I believe that the product is working to improve the native domain controllers in the cloud. My company studies the road map of Microsoft Azure quite frequently and closely. I believe the solution is working on areas where my company finds ideas or areas for improvement.

The product's current price needs to be lowered from an improvement perspective.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for four and a half years. My company has a partnership with Microsoft.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. The scalability of the product is a selling point of the solution.

The product is suitable for companies of all sizes. Small companies can use Office 365. Requirements might arise for businesses, regardless of the size of the companies.

The solution's technical support was very good.

The product's initial setup phase was simple. There are some complexities attached to the solution when it comes to certain niches and during migrations.

The solution is deployed on a public cloud.

The product helps save costs for our company since we need not refresh the hardware part every four years. The box provided by the solution can be turned on and off. Most of our company's clients save a fair bit of money with Microsoft Azure.

I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price.

Microsoft Azure offers a better all-in-one package than Google Workspace or G Suite. Compared to its competitors, Microsoft Azure is a much better option for mature businesses.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft Azure for migration purposes.

The portal makes it easier to work with the solution.

The solution's initial setup was a bit complex in the beginning. We had to go through a major learning curve before we got hands-on familiarity with it.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for one year.

I rate Microsoft Azure a seven out of ten for stability.

Microsoft Azure is a scalable solution. Less than 20 users in our organization use Microsoft Azure.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten for scalability.

I rate Microsoft Azure a five to six out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The solution's deployment time depends purely on the size of the application. On average, the solution's deployment would take us anywhere from two weeks and longer. Depending on our testing, it would take us about a month to design and deploy the solution.

Microsoft Azure is deployed on the cloud.

I would recommend Microsoft Azure to other users, but they should have a strong system integrator or someone working with Microsoft to assist. The strength would lie with the organization deploying the solution; they have to be on par to understand better what is happening.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Azure a seven out of ten.

Our target markets are advisors and all the staff they need to manage for their customers, such as regulatory information, accounting tax, tax income, tax regulation, accounting, balance sheets. We have also targeted different niche countries. It's a very regulated market and these are our principal customer.

At the corporate level, we have another division. That does not produce or sell software, but content, normative content, educational content.

For the software division, we work with advisors and payroll consultants.

Microsoft Azure has helped organizations because they no longer need to do a lot of server maintenance.

The valuable features of Microsoft Azure are that it is cloud-based and has good storage. The storage is completely managed by Azure. We do not need to do any patching of security because it is handled by Azure which is a benefit. The solution is fully compatible with the Microsoft technology stack and is very scalable.

All the Microsoft Azure's interface for managing the portal is very good and responsive.

The solution should improve the shared cache. For the shared cache, Microsoft uses RADIUS third-party services. We have a lot of trouble with RADIUS and I suppose that is due to the fact that is not owned completely by Microsoft.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately five years.

Microsoft Azure is highly stable.

Microsoft Azure is scalable in my experience.

We have approximately 400 customers with many terabytes of data. We have some customers that are using this solution that has 400,000 customers.

At the moment our product is intensively being used by the advisors that are onboarded because our software is the primary tool for the advisors.

If we have a problem with Microsoft Azure we open a ticket with Microsoft and they respond very quickly and are very helpful.

I have previously used other solutions but nothing comparable to the Microsoft Azure cloud solution.

We chose Microsoft Azure because it's tied to Microsoft technologies. We are already working with Visual Studio and other Microsoft technologies, such as .NET, and other on-premise products. The migration path is all shorter and our corporation suggested using Microsoft Azure.

The initial setup is difficult because when you move into a fully managed cloud environment with a lot of services, you change your mind completely about how you operate and in the first month we had to learn a lot of tasks.

Looking back to the past the difficulty was not the interface of the solution, there was a lot of information to know and to have knowledge about concepts for cloud service that took time. There was a lot of documentation and finding the correct one can be difficult sometimes. When I used Google to find something, I can find a lot of information but the problem is to find the current information or the most effective information.

There is a lot of different elements you need to set up or configure, such as the environment, monitoring, deployment of applications, preparing the dashboard for monitoring, and the continuous development integration by clients.

We have two kinds of deployment, a continuous integration deployment when we don't change the database schema. This is fully unattended and can be done online with no problem for the users. It takes approximately 30 minutes but the time can vary.

Once a month, or less, there is a major release. In this case, often we modify the database schema. This requires stopping all the applications, no user can have access while the modification to the database is taking place. The operation takes from half an hour to an hour and a half depending on the database schema and the types of modification required. When we change the structure of tables we have hundreds of thousands of records that can take a lot of time.

We are moving to a more continuous development strategy. We are trying to have more applications because at the moment we have approximately seven web apps and a lot of services, but they are too tightly bound to the database. They're trying to divide them for more flexibility and to have continuous deployment. We had no continuous deployment. Normally we deployed some minor releases once or two a week, and there is a major release once a month. We are moving to have more continuous deployment.

We are working this year on test automation from unit test integration. They're investing a lot in this because we managed numbers for the tax declaration. Regulation can be problematic.

We are producing, maintaining, and are selling solutions for our customers, such as Microsoft Azure. We do not use an integrator.

We have a two-person team that does the implementation and maintenance of the solution. Once you prepare the infrastructure, sometimes we have to improve by changing some things. Recently we had to prepare for the disaster recovery from Europe to Europe, and we had to invest time in the pipelines and deployment.

When you have on-premise solutions you have to manage lots of aspects, such as security, patching, large expense, and acquiring hardware and servers. With Microsoft Azure, you have the ability to activate a lot of processing power and then dismiss it when you do not need it. It saves you a lot of money not have to have the infrastructure or the maintenance. 

The cost of Microsoft Azure depends on the services that are used and there can be a discount at a corporate level from Microsoft.

In the next release of Microsoft Azure, they will be addressing the problem of the continuous  ETL workload to continually extract the data and ingest it in a docker analysis database. This will be released in the next version released in 2022. Microsoft Azure is continuously improving the solution for the market.

It is important to know that cloud services work differently than on-premise solutions.

I was talking with our colleague in the internal department to let me test the scalability of his system because we have a process from our application to the online shop. They are having a problem with the scalability test because of their hardware. They have hardware that they can't scale the testing environment. Using Microsoft Azure we do not have these issues because it is on the cloud.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

The product is being used for document sharing and archiving. The company wants their customers to be able to pull certain documents that they put on file. The idea is that through active directory B2B, they will offer access to the different files and customers will be able to pull the files they need from the server. The company uses information protection to make sure that only the right people have access to the right files. We are integrators, mainly on the software side. We are partners with Microsoft Azure and I'm a senior solution architect. 

The company has different vendors that they bring in. This product has made it easier to onboard those individuals and to provide access to them when needed and then to basically cut them off when the time comes. The way they have it set up, documents can't be downloaded. They are only accessible online but can be accessed from anywhere so the company doesn't have to worry about setting up VPNs and the like. They provide a username, password, a two-factor authentication and that enables access.

Information protection is a good feature because you can label different documents and different files, and that allows them to put like NDA files in a specific bucket, as opposed to just regular, safe or confidential storage.

This solution is not user friendly to set up and it's difficult to understand, particularly with regard to information protection and the sort of licensing needed to utilize it. Simplification would go a long way. 

I'd like to see them improve on the watermarking. There's a feature that allows you to watermark documents that are checked out. Currently it watermarks a document with whoever publishes it. For example, if you wanted to watermark the email address, it doesn't watermark with the person checking out the file, but with the person publishing the document. It would be more valuable if the watermarking was related to the person checking out the document, in case it leaks out.

I've been using this solution for several years and on my most recent project, for the past six months. 

The stability has been great. We haven't had any issues whatsoever with stability.

As far as I know, scalability is fine. Our current customer isn't huge so I can't speak to enterprise size customers. It's not infinite scalability, but it is Azure Cloud. If you need more storage, you buy more storage. 

The initial setup is fairly complex. There is a ton of documentation, but once you get through that it's really not difficult, it's just not intuitive. The product requires better documentation that explains things. I think a lot of it has to do with the licensing requirements. It's not obvious and so you can be following a step-by-step tutorial and still not get it right because the software requirements aren't right but it doesn't give you that in clear text. 

You can probably set this up within 30 minutes, realistically, as long as you know all the steps. Unfortunately, it took about four or five hours to troubleshoot the situation because we didn't understand what the license requirements were. We had to go and obtain those licenses and try it a second time. It'll be fine now because we understand it but there are certain things like having to be a security administrator within the roles and responsibility matrix, and that's not really outlined in the documentation.

The company wanted it to deploy rapidly. They didn't want to spend a lot on this project to buy storage, and clear that storage, ensuring that it was 100% secure. This was either going to be a very short-term project or it was going to blow up to something large and they weren't sure which direction it was going to go. Enabling them to use OPEX spend just to utilize what they need when they need it at a low cost, was super valuable to them.

I would recommend anyone wanting to implement this solution to carry out background homework on active directory, on information access management (IAM), and then understand the licensing before you deploy. That aside, it's pretty straightforward. I've learned that setting up secure documents doesn't have to be difficult as long as you take into account those caveats of understanding your licensing and active directory.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use Microsoft Azure for the hosting of websites and the management of email and the Outlook platform. We also use the solution for the storage of online files.

The most efficient feature of Microsoft Azure is that we can use it to update a website with a few clicks. Microsoft Azure is integrated with Visual Studio Code, and we can update or publish directly from Visual Studio Code.

I appreciate the GDPR that is in place with Microsoft Azure. The solution also has compliance with other country's local privacy laws. So, the privacy feature of Microsoft products is very easily accessible and available.

The solution's email hosting pricing could be improved. Microsoft Azure gives different options in terms of how you're going to access your email. It would be good if the solution could improve and give cheaper emails that can work in Outlook.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for five years.

Microsoft Azure is a very stable solution, and I've never had any issues with the solution's stability.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Around 30 clients are using Microsoft Azure.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

I previously used Amazon Web Services. I switched to Microsoft Azure because Amazon Web Services was expensive.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward, especially with the SSL. Getting the SSL certificate is more straightforward with Microsoft Azure than with Amazon Web Services.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

The solution can be deployed in five to ten minutes. You have to ensure that your Visual Studio Code is set up with the required tools for Microsoft Azure. From there on, you continue uploading to Microsoft Azure the files that you want to upload. Then, you set up your Azure to identify the domains and to sync Azure with your domain host. These are the steps you have to take. If you follow it step by step, the full process will not take longer than 30 minutes.

The website is straightforward to configure, and also very quick to update. In other words, I can update a website even from my development tool, Visual Studio Code. I use Visual Studio Code in my company to develop websites and also to deploy the websites from Visual Studio Code. So, that makes Azure completely above what I've experienced with Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft Azure is deployed on the cloud in our organization. One to five people with knowledge of Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio Code, and domain hosting are needed for the solution's deployment and maintenance. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Users need to understand what they want to deploy and what cloud services they need to use because there are different trends in each one of these cloud services. Users can go multi-cloud as well.

Microsoft Azure helps save infrastructure, staff, time, and insurance. You'll save a lot on ISO certification. I had a client who wanted a solution that would have required the client to be ISO-certified to manage the privacy or guarantee the privacy and security of data.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.