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.

Compared to other cloud platforms, I find the Azure portal very user-friendly. It's more intuitive and clearer than some, but it depends on your specific needs because Azure offers many services. 

For instance, working with Synapse, a complex technology with diverse processing engines, requires deep knowledge. In our experience with clients, using Databricks, a third-party service, on top of Azure can be helpful.

There's an ongoing development, particularly concerning the Data Fabric offering launched a few months ago.

Data Fabric is an additional offering which is Software as a service "as a service" application, unlike the core Azure platform initially focused on "platform as a service." It sits on top of Azure. 

We thought Azure could be more flexible and cost-effective, but our experience suggests this separation might simplify things for some customers. It's worth exploring as a potential improvement for specific needs.

I have been using it for several years. We have used it, or we have architectures. We consult about Azure. 

We do a lot here in this area because it's also a big topic for us. But it's a more general consulting topic for me. I have some experience with it, but I do not implement it. Internally, we use some Azure services. 

We have all kinds of typically, ranging more towards larger size customers, midsized customers, and a lot in the financial area. 

For example, with a Synapse environment, we might need to switch to Databricks for better scalability. But overall, the platform itself scales very well. Based on my experience, I'd give it an eight out of ten.

Azure is the best in Germany compared to AWS or Google. It has the best German footprint, so the support is better locally.

But globally, it's good, not always the best. Some users have very good experiences with Google's support as well.  

Neutral

From the consulting perspective, we consult on every technology on the market. For example, Snowflake is a big topic on our side.  

I have a lot of history in SAP. With current or former SAP solutions.  

In our company, we are more Microsoft-based and Microsoft CRM.

The technical part of setting up such a platform is typically the smaller part. And for an experienced consultant, it's okay. It's nothing special. It's more about the processes and organization, which is important to consider here.

So, I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy. 

Typically, in Germany, we see that setting up is very complex; enterprises work well with Azure setups if users are already experienced at different points with Azure. But it's a little bit more easy compared to Google or Amazon. But it depends a little bit on the service and the environment you need.

From a technical perspective, it can set up something in a day or in some hours. That's not a problem. 

The thing is more the organizational level here, what is allowed, who can do it, where the costs are going, and so on. The process is typically much more about the deployment or, depending on whether you have already built a platform and just have to automate the deployment process. 

For example, it works very well, typically, but the initial setup of a platform is more for organizational things, but this is not what I do. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight 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.

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.

I work with our enterprise architecture. In my network, there are almost 400 total applications. I have been working here for almost six months on a network migration and in those six months, I have been working with many of those applications that have been included with the involvement of Azure in the migration.   

We are migrating everything from the old network to a new architecture. There are multiple teams that I work with and people work with me throughout the organization. I review all the target architectures and the deployment and everything that comes along with the pieces of the migration that involve Azure. Any issues, large or small, I have to look into. These issues might be simple certificate issues or they may involve multiple interfaces that need to be used for a solution.  

Because we have a very complex system, it is not easy to complete the migration. The landscape also has a mixture of different technologies and platforms. If I have to customize, I just get a Terraform script or ARM template from a developer who is assigned to that task. I review all that stuff that they give to me.  

When we went to the version of Azure that we use now, there are certain solutions that we created. If we had trouble, we worked with Microsoft to create that solution for our organization and the problems that needed to be solved.  

We define our own solutions with Microsoft that are not available in the open market. Because of the way we have used Azure, we do not really have a very focused end-product. It is a highly customized product that we have built using many tools.  

Azure is now a mixture of solutions. There are certain applications, which are IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) applications, where we just go and use them. Then there are certain applications that are a mixture of IaaS and PaaS (Platform as a Service). For certain parts, we use private clouds, public clouds, or hybrid clouds. We originally wanted to use more public clouds, but as we proceed, we are moving into more hybrid mechanisms. In the future, I don't know exactly what direction we will take because the technologies and the climate are changing so quickly.  

But right now, we are only using Azure with images being created from the existing architecture. For Azure, we use private cloud, public cloud, and mixed, or hybrid cloud as needed and all of these work together.  

In the future, we may go for some specific function-based services or even open-market APIs. We can use open APIs with Azure. API management is also possible. So there are a lot of permutations and combinations that go with each application based on sizing and NFR (Non-functional Requirements) validation.  

For Microsoft Azure, we use the product itself as a platform, I work mostly with their services. These can be PaaS services or DNS services, monitoring services, storage services — basically all the supporting services that are available to us with Azure. Anything that is not available, we try to build on PaaS. If the services we want are not available, I have to do a complete fabrication.  

So we use mostly PaaS services for most of the supporting services and then we work further in solution optimization, which is something we can accomplish through Azure. Ultimately all that depends on the budget. If a company is ready to spend on a cloud solution, an ROI (Return on Investment) model helps. The amount of customizations and the real need for a solution comes out of the realities of the ROI.  

Our contracts are based on supplying solutions for what the customer needs. If they have selected that a particular application will be available and make this a system mandate which we have to flow, then we have to keep those applications. Azure is one of the tools that we are using to help make these kinds of customizations and to meet their expectations after the migration.  

Azure gives us a different form of PaaS to work with during our migration and helps us to meet multiple requirements that current solutions do not provide in any one product. 

One of the most valuable things about Azure, I think, is that it is pretty straightforward. There are well-defined processes and it is not a bad product to work with. I only work on Azure right now most of the time. I cannot directly compare it with other solutions in the present situation because it is not always practical to consider every solution. Certain platforms on the market are very strong with other services. For example, Kubernetes on RedHat Openhift is better for working with AWS. But I have to ask from a usability, a complexity and a budget standpoint if that is really required.  

If I do my work and my applications are sorted out well in advance, I do not have any issues. From a user perspective — not from a cloud architect or enterprise architect perspective — my requirements are being met. As long as these requirements are met, I do not see anything as a showstopper. If there is a showstopper which I think I absolutely can not solve with Azure and I think another solution would handle, then possibly we may go into a multi-cloud scenario.  

That is also a limitation for our organization. The goal is never to seek complexity. Personally, I think there is no direct comparison between what solution is better and what solution is worse. There are only solutions that work or are capable of doing something and those solutions which can not do it, or were not designed to do it, or do not want their product to do it, et cetera.  

Part of my place in working with these solutions as part of my process is working with products I am comfortable with. So the more that I use Azure, the more comfortable I get with what it can do as a solution, and the more comfortable I am using it. If I started using AWS more, I would get more comfortable with AWS and maybe incorporate that more heavily in the solutions.  

There are some small things that could be done to improve Azure. I think they should actually do more to implement function as a service. It is a completely separate capability that they currently do not address. Function as a service can be a completely different scheme altogether than PaaS or IaaS which it does quite well.  

For an example of a FaaS, I think the Azure product can be stronger in terms of storage. I would like to see it have better management systems as a service specifically for managing documents. Right now they are handled as a more generalized object.  

Say Azure came out with Microsoft Document Management and it was very strong as a service. It would not have to be deployed as a complete infrastructure. I would be able to use that as a service inside my organization and it is a product that any organization can use.  

The question is what is the separate USP (Unique Selling Point) that Microsoft will provide to the user that would fit a unique need when making FaaS solutions available. Document management systems have already been proven to be very popular by Google. Microsoft Office uses OneDrive storage. There may be a better way to promote document management in a more general PaaS. Sometimes it is very useful to virtualize a platform or an infrastructure, but in the same way, it is sometimes valuable to virtualize a function. Applications may be a collection of functions.  

It is this type of branching out of services that Azure can do within the structure they already have.  

They are targeting Azure into specific domains and not working as much with open-source as they could. That would be helpful. I think eventually this approach will just drive the competition away. If I have a product that is very good for manufacturing as a function — something like is being done with Edge — it might be beneficial for Azure to be able to tie in this FaaS and let manufacturing clients start working with the solution without having to reach outside of Azure. Right now that I do not see that happening and it is an opportunity that Microsoft is missing with Azure.  

I am responsible for designing our migration, so I have to work with Azure to define the parts of that solution. I had previously been using AWS mostly for personal services so I was familiar with PaaS platforms, but I have now also been using Azure exclusively for the last six months to supplement the functionality we require.  

The product is stable. There are a few qualifications attached to that.  

I think the stability of Azure varies depending on the workloads. It is more stable from the perspective of how it behaves in a mid-size deployment. For a very, very large implementation, I have yet to see that same kind of inherent stability. I believe it is because of the complexity of the client's system or architecture.  

You may be able to say that if it is more of a Microsoft product landscape, then possibly it is more stable in general. The more that there is a mixture of technologies, then it will tend to be less stable. No application can be stable in every circumstance.  

As the project I am engaged in is very large, we have experienced some episodes of instability. We solve the stability problems as we go along to a great extent. But I think there are a lot of situations that have to be dealt with in real-time. Though we have direct contact with a Microsoft team architect, it is difficult for them at times to just jump in and solve an issue. You can not usually solve a problem instantly looking down at it from 55,000 feet when the situation on the ground is very, very complex.  

At first, they only have generalized solutions to your problem. I think they need an extension of the existing team. This would be like a core team to work with client organizations to do case studies to define patterns in what is causing instabilities.  

Because Azure is cloud technology and cloud comes with its own problems, these bleed over into Azure stability. All these patterns that contribute to instability have to come out in order to be solved. As Microsoft collects more case studies and more knowledge of where these problems tend to occur, this should enable them to stabilize the product against those issues.  

Overall, I would say Microsoft Azure is a stable solution, but even as a stable solution, it usually has some bugs or glitches.  

As of today, we have almost 1,000 people using the solution. We have a very big migration project that will last for the next four to five years before it is completed. They have many applications and many users for those applications. If the volume of users or applications were to scale, that should not be a problem.  

I do not really have much direct contact with the Azure or Microsoft support teams. We have a separate team for that. I have a great architect that I work with here (Sweeden). But if an issue comes up, the application team goes to work on it to support the resolution. It is their option to contact Azure to raise that issue or resolve it themselves.  

I was using AWS before Azure, but I was using it mostly for my own personal needs. I was deploying my own applications. I used it for about two years but not from a company perspective. I deployed my own applications in the public cloud and loaded them there for use at a personal level.  

In the company right now, I am only using Microsoft Azure. The company itself is using everything, really. At this point, my experience in the company is specialization as the person who is helping to utilize Azure.  

The initial setup was simple and it is simple for a simple application. If I want to build with a simple application, I simply go do that. But if I have a very heavy interface-based application, then the choices become more difficult and involved.  

If I have a WebSphere application, that is easy. A complex platform or a complex interface dependence becomes difficult to implement because of restrictions. If I can not simply go and deploy as it is, obviously it is more complex to deploy in the system.  

For a small company with a typical landscape of Microsoft technology, it becomes very easy to work with Azure. It is possible to go through that setup by yourself and test your servers and the entire functionality. 

After deployment, you will require maintenance. We can not simply have a production list and push everything out. You need pre-production, testing, and then deployment. All that has to be done on Azure.  

There are a lot of things you will have to work out with security certificates. Meanwhile, things keep on changing in the product itself. New upgrades keep on rolling out. If the old version does not support the new upgrade, then you will need to get involved with patching and other upgrades to take care of the issues that are introduced.  

We have a dedicated team for maintenance. We know we need to do testing and that is why we created tasks for that. But, generally, I think complexities in the setup depend upon what applications you are building. Simple applications and simple systems make for simple deployment.  

We are working with the vendor directly. We also have contacts with Microsoft. Microsoft directly provides us all the tools and information we need for implementations.  

The pricing of Azure depends on the build of what you prepare. You can optimize everything, and with Azure, you can optimize your utility and costs. For example, say you create a subscription and you want to do more backups and you want a private cloud for that. This will affect your cost differently than if you do not add the backups with Azure or if you add the services with a public or hybrid cloud.  

We have very good, large contracts with big organizations. We do very high-level analytics and modeling to predict outcomes. For example, we may show that a certain solution that we implement with Azure will be likely to reduce a company's cost from the current level to 50% over the next five years. That, to me, is important when considering the cost of a subscription. It is not just the cost perspective that is important, but the ROI as well.  

I would definitely recommend Azure as a solution because it is a popular product by a major brand and it is very easy to use. I think those people I would recommend it to should normally be those who understand the cloud and the advantages and disadvantages. I use it for a lot of things and I do not see any problems. I love it now as a solution so I would recommend it. But if I have a different experience with another very large migration project using a different product, I would have to compare Azure with that. I may get more comfortable with the other product for reasons I have not discovered yet.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Azure as a seven-out-of-ten. It is a good product and I love using it but it could do even more and has a lot of possibilities to grow as part of a relatively new technology. The future is more open than closed to the possibilities.  

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.

We use Microsoft Azure for task management. 

The product is a cloud solution. 

Microsoft Azure needs to improve its user interface. New developers and teams have difficulty understanding its lifecycle. 

I have been working with the product for 12 years. 

I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. 

Microsoft Azure is very scalable, and I rate it a ten out of ten. My company has 15 users. 

Microsoft's tech support is awful. 

I used Jira before Microsoft Azure. 

I rate the product's deployment an eight out of ten. It can be completed in a few hours. 

Our DevOps engineers manage the installation. 

It's a positive experience for every development team to use Microsoft Azure, especially when working with Microsoft products. However, if working with open-source solutions like PHP or Google programming languages, opting for other cloud solutions such as Google Cloud or AWS is recommended. These platforms are considered more suitable for open-source solutions compared to Microsoft Azure. I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We use Microsoft Azure for database service and advanced analytics.

We have a process where we collect a large amount of data from different sources. By using a database, we can analyze and present it in business intelligence (BI). Oh, here's another example. Some months ago, we started using Power BI embedded, which helped optimize the number of licenses for our company. Additionally, with this development, we improved the centralization of tables. 

I believe the personalization model and the cost optimization are the most valuable features. With the model, you pay for what you use. For instance, in this development, we utilized Power BI embedded and deployed the entire web page using Azure resources. By leveraging Azure, we can easily control and adjust the platform as needed, resulting in cost optimization.

For additional features, I believe our team is interested in exploring SmartOps on Azure.

We are also exploring the power platform and have a keen interest in leveraging premium features. It would be beneficial if Microsoft could enhance the free version to allow for more exploration and development. That's my only suggestion regarding Azure.

I have been using this solution for over a year. 

I would rate it a five out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Azure an eight out of ten. 

We had some issues with Microsoft's support team. In a project where we had to scale with Azure, it involved multiple people and sessions, and it took several weeks to resolve the issue. It was very difficult to get a resolution.

Negative

The initial setup was easy. It's a good platform for deployment.

There is a return on investment. It's worth considering.

I'm currently comparing it with AWS, and we don't have full knowledge of all the features and their inclusion in the price. AWS seems to have a slight advantage in terms of price. So, Microsoft Azure is slightly expensive.

I would recommend the suite. In our company, we use the Microsoft suite, which includes Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive. I believe that Microsoft offers a very good product.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.