Microsoft Azure Reviews

The existing infrastructure of our customers is on-prem. We will be migrating or moving from on-prem to Microsoft Azure cloud.

We don't have to spend money to purchase the hardware, set up a data center, get people to work on it, and maintain security. We don't have to spend any money on these things. It is ready to use, and resources are available for us. We just create an account on Azure and start using the services. 

The time to market is very fast. We just supply the resources, virtual machines, and databases, and our applications are up and running. This helps our customers and us to be more future-ready and cloud-ready.

Its scalability is valuable. Depending on our requirements, we can add as many virtual machines as we want. We are able to get high availability for services. Services are always available, and they have the maximum uptime. If there is any issue with one of the services, another service is always available. 

It is pay-as-you-go. You don't have to spend any money upfront. You use the service and pay after one month or a couple of hours of use.

For deploying multiple resources in a big number, such as in hundreds, we need a streamlined process and more user-friendly scrips. The scripts have to be more user-friendly, and they should also supply some standard templates to deploy multiple resources at a time. Currently, it is very easy to deploy a couple of resources, but if you want to deploy multiple resources, it becomes complex.

The material that they provide for integration with an existing on-prem data center is complex. They have to make them user-friendly. The scripts related to resource management need to be simplified.

I have been using this solution for one year. In our company, we have been using it for four to five years.

It has a very high uptime for services. They are able to provide as per Service Level Agreement (SLA). We are not seeing any downtime for our applications. Our users have not reported any issues. 

They have their internal redundancy for hardware and software. If there is an issue with any hardware, another hardware is ready to take the load.

It is very scalable. We can add as many virtual machines as we want. We have 400 to 500 people who are using this solution.

I have not worked with support. We work in a design team where we have a dedicated Microsoft account partner to provide support. That support is fine. If there is an issue with running virtual machines or there are any infrastructure issues, another team takes care of that. I've not got any complaints from them that their support is not working.

Previously, we had the regular on-prem solution with our own data center. We had to deploy physical servers, networks, databases, and everything else. We needed flexibility and scalability for our customers and applications, and that's why we moved to the cloud.

The initial setup was easy. 

It is operational expenditure (OPEX). There is no cost upfront. When you start using it, you have to pay the charges. Initially, the cost is less, but after you start using it more and more, the cost will go higher. It is a little bit costly, but that is okay because you get better resources. You also get better support in terms of how you create the resources. Documentation is available, and the SLAs are met. 

Companies are now starting to switch over to Azure, and before doing any kind of migration, they need to plan each and everything from scratch. They should have a Microsoft consultant or somebody from Microsoft so that they can plan well before using Azure. Otherwise, they will not be aware of where they are spending and how they can reduce the spending. They would also not know whether their security compliances are being met and whether their network is being fully utilized or having some issues. Proper planning has to be done before using Azure. 

I would rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

We use Azure as an infrastructure service. Most of our customers have web servers but we also manage Azure for SAP R/3. It works fine. They do have a lot of options for SAP All-In-One, but we don't have as many options for SAP Business One. What Azure offers for Business One customers is too short to have enough servers certified. It works fine but it's not a complete solution for customers that use SAP Business One.

Azure has improved my organization because it is a new technology and so the customers who don't have enough knowledge about the cloud delegate the administration of their cloud infrastructure to us. We incorporate and add a new service to our product lineup about how to manage their Azure. It impacts our business because we're able to incorporate this new service.

The Pricing Calculator would be the most valuable feature. It's easy to use. 

I would like to have more certified servers for SAP. Our customers need an easier interface to manage Azure. They don't have people who have cloud knowledge. The knowledge group is taking time and they use our services to manage the cloud data. Azure is built for auto services but it's not easy. The interface is not easy to use. I'd like to see them develop a better interface and more graphical information about the resource and the consumer.

There's a machine, the server. The smallest machine that they have has 112 GB of RAM. It is big for a customer. It has around 16 cores and a 112 GB of RAM. Amazon has a server with around 8 cores and 60 GB of RAM. The smallest certified machine for SAP Business One HANA in Amazon Web Services is 8 cores and 60 GB of RAM and Microsoft it's 16 and 112 GB of RAM. It's too big for a small customer. Because this machine is able to manage 50 concurrent users it's too big for a customer with 22 or 30 users. 

Until now I have only had a few problems with stability. There was a problem with Azure Active Directory in the US central region that affected almost all of the data centers around two or three months ago but otherwise, it's good stability. The stability is good enough.

Scalability is fine. We tried to create services in the data center in Brazil and there was not enough space. There were not enough cores and RAM so we were not able to create it. We opened a ticket with technical service and they told to use another region.

We chose Azure because of its scalability. With Azure, we are able to use the size of a machine that we need.

I haven't opened any tickets with technical support. The technical team opened most tickets but from what I hear, technical support has been fine. It could be better. They could improve the time it takes to respond but I have never heard about any issues from the technical guys about their support. They would prefer to get a faster response back because when you have a problem, you have your boss asking for updates so you need a fast answer.

It's a very expensive machine and I would like for them to improve the price. There are smaller sized competitors who offer cheaper prices. 

We didn't look at any other options because we are not business partners with other cloud solutions or providers. We only have Azure so we try to solve everything with Azure. If a customer asks us for a proposal to move or create some interesting tool in the cloud, we all use Azure. We never compared it to other cloud providers.

I would rate this solution a nine because they are always incorporating new alerts and new features. I wouldn't give it a ten because it's sometimes not easy to use and the price is not a fair price for the solution.

I don't know why customers think that Amazon is the best. I think that the customer thinks that the best option for cloud is an Amazon service and the second one is Microsoft. My advice to someone considering this or a similar solution is to be careful with Amazon because the customers think that they are always on the list.

• Resource manager
• API
• Cloud storage
• Virtual machine hosting

Our company plans to use Azure for training and for internal use. We use ADFS and the cloud storage mostly. We are also moving to host labs in Azure to offload demand from our datacenter, when additional hosting capacity is required without notice.

The system has some limitations on resource use, such as number of cores, max transactions, I/O, maximum number of VMs etc. These limits make some things very difficult, and could be improved. Also Azure is constantly undergoing changes, and the move to Azure API v2 offers a lot of improvement, but is still rather unfinished. Once it is complete it will be great, but in the meantime there is much room for improvement. Microsoft is constantly looking for ways to improve, so many of the improvements I can think of, they are already working on.

A little over one year

There were some issues with development and the resource limitations. We also ran into a problem with networking. Network changes over the API are synchronous, and only one change can occur at any given time, locking the subscriptions networking config until the last operation completed. This was resolved in the V2 API. Most of the problems we ran into with V1 are resolved and simplified in V2.

There have been few problems with stability. Only a couple times there were outages that only impacted our development environment. Notice of these service interruptions are generally given with plenty of time to prepare.

There are limits as to how much resources you can use in Azure (as with all cloud platforms). This can be a problem if you plan to host hundreds of virtual machines with an hours’ notice. They have a process that requires a customer to go through tech support, and request/justify the need for a resource increase. If you need more than 20 networks, you will need to open a new subscription, and move resources to that subscription. They simply will not budge on some limit increases, and will on others. Currently opening up a new subscription is the solution to the resource limit problem. Azure is not really intended to handle our level of churn (creation and deletion of hundreds of VMs per minute), but we have been able to work with them and work around the problems we ran into.

The level of customer service is generally very good. They are quick to respond and resolve the problem quickly. I have had a couple of issues where the technical support staff didn’t interpret the problem correctly and moved a severe issue down from a two hour response time to a 24 hour response time. I quickly responded and told them that it was impacting ongoing business, and they moved the ticket back up, and resolved it within the two hour timespan. All other interaction with customer service has been outstanding. After a co-worker posted on Twitter making a remark about the UI, we received a call from customer service. They setup a meeting with us to discuss what problems we ran into with the new UI, and they asked us for input on what their developers could do to improve our experience. They were taking a proactive approach to customer service, not waiting for a problem to come to them, but sought out those with problems and resolved them.

I would rate their support at 8/10. A ten being perfect support without ever running into a problem, one being at a very poor level of customer support. I consider a rating of 8 to be a high rating. I should also add that the only support I have received has been for free, this only includes sales related issues and limit increases. I don’t have experience with their paid technical support which I would expect to be much better. They will charge for support even if you are a paying customer, so a rating of 8/10 reflects the support fees as well.

In the past, we used our own solution. We have datacenters where we host our in house solutions. We didn’t completely switch to Azure, but did offload some things to free up hardware for other purposes. We also want to offload hosting to Azure in times of high demand.

The setup for us is quite complex because we need to integrate it into a custom solution. The setup includes development time and changes to our core systems. This is not an easy task, but it's not at the fault of Azure or any other cloud service provider. The API has a learning curve, but anyone familiar with cloud services, and the use of a remote API should have no problem learning and implementing their system.

We implemented our solution in house. Most Azure integration is done by me. Azure is simple enough that interfacing your system with Azure can be done by a single person.

As for time to ROI I am not sure, these details are determined by upper management. The main components for the return is the idea that we will not only be able to offer a new set of training material for Azure specific material as a new product, but we can also avoid purchasing expensive equipment to satisfy a short term need for hardware and resources. Long term needs are hosted in house on our equipment. Even with the high cost of Azure hosting, purchasing additional equipment for a temporary need can result in a large amount of unnecessary costs.

Our setup costs are the costs of development time to integrate our system with Azure. Because the project is ongoing, this is difficult to determine. The cost for subscriptions in development is about $150 a month. Our MSDN subscription includes a credit which takes care of this cost. In production we forward the costs of events to the customer who is hosting the event. I don’t get the exact details on the day to day operation costs for internal subscriptions.

We evaluated the Google Cloud and AWS. All have a varying range of features and paradigms. Some appear to be cheaper, but when you add up the costs and read the fine print, you find that this may not be the case. We do plan to offer services on other platforms as well, but that is a different project. I have done research on all platforms to make sure the core system is compatible with all others. Azure is so far my favourite. The support is great, and the pricing is easy to work out. Other options had a lot of fine print and stipulations. Also the API is very easy to use, with plenty of references on MSDN.

Overall, it is a great, solution but is a bit expensive, has some minor limitations, and working around these limits can be a challenge. I still gave Azure a high score because of the support, feature set, availability, and the tools and documentation provided for the API.

My advice is to be very clear on the costs associated with what you plan to do. Most people will ask how much it costs to host their infrastructure in Azure, but that question is different for each scenario. Microsoft has an Azure price calculator that you can use to estimate the costs for your planned architecture. I would also recommend doing extensive research on the limits imposed by Microsoft. There is a page that details these limits, but there are some things that are not visible to the users. I would also recommend researching the hidden layers of the storage platform known as storage stamps, and how it can impact the copy speed of storage blobs.

We use Microsoft Azure for hosting websites. It provides comprehensive control over our infrastructure and services.

Azure is easy to use and visualize.

It should improve database performance and make the platform more user-friendly. Additionally, providing more tools for seamless migration from AWS to Azure would be beneficial. Performance testing should ensure that systems remain reliable and transactions do not drop unexpectedly.

It should be thoroughly testet before release. Additionally, in Kubernetes, detailed documentation should be included, especially for STO.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for five years.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft Azure is highly scalable. It enhance the application's performance by managing increased demand efficiently. For instance, if around one thousand requests per second are coming in, Azure can handle this load seamlessly. Its scalability ensures consistent performance even under heavy traffic.

If you have an issue with Microsoft Azure, they will help me resolve it.

Positive

We use Terraform to deploy and configure our infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, following a hub-and-spoke model for networking.

It is a continuous process. Mostly, it takes about one and a half months for approval and around one month for deployment. Based on customer requirements or new needs, we continuously update the resources within the Azure infrastructure.

If I create a Terraform script, it significantly reduces the need for support. Typically, just two or three people are needed to manage it.

Azure is a strong competitor to AWS. AWS has a competitive pricing strategy, but Azure offers unique benefits. Azure provides credits, which can reduce costs for a certain period. For example, you might receive yearly credits, resulting in zero infrastructure investment for that year. 

In comparison to AWS, Azure is user-friendly and has lower cost. Azure also provides good performance over time.

In Kubernetes, what we are using offers different features, which is good. We are enabling more drivers and integrations, which is beneficial. Regarding virtual machines, they also perform very well.

We are using cognitive services include the Face API.

We have built a comprehensive AI search feature, specifically Cognitive Search, and implemented it in our application.

If a product is supposed to include certain features, it performs as expected. The support team ensures it is a reliable product, without parts that don't work. Products are thoroughly tested to ensure quality. However, in Azure, maintaining new products can be challenging and requires significant work. AWS fixes these issues more efficiently. 

Some startups choose Azure because they may not have much funding. These startups find Azure services beneficial and cost-effective.

Overall, I rate the solution 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.

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.

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 buy licenses in order to provide an ecosystem on Microsoft, using Azure for documents and also for accessing Office 365 and for corporate messaging and so on.

We use Azure for everything. For example, we use Microsoft Teams on Azure for our conference calls and we also use scrum tools and project management tools as well. we use it on endpoints to work in remote places. Our CRM and procurement platforms sit on Azure. There's also antivirus features on it.

The solution is good for enterprise control and managing various systems.

The solution is quite stable.

The scalability has been good.

We haven't seen any security gaps as of yet. It feels very safe.

The initial setup is very easy.

Technical support has been extremely helpful.

We need more security to be available on our smartphones and mobile devices. They need to improve the protections available in that area in particular. We're actually currently looking for solutions that will protect devices of this nature so that they can safely access the corporate network. 

We began to use this solution last year, in 2020, when we begin to have to do remote work.

The stability of the solution is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. the performance has been good. 

The scalability of Azure is very good. If a company wants to expand it, it can do so with relative ease.

We have about 300 endpoints in our organization that use Microsoft Azure. 

The technical support on offer is very good. If we ever need help or extra assistance, they are happy to jump in. We're quite satisfied with the level of service on offer.

The installation was mostly straightforward, although we did run into a few small issues. We had the local Microsoft team assist us, however. For the most part, everything ran smoothly.

It typically takes two to four hours to install everything.

We have a technical team of 15 people that can handle deployment and maintenance as necessary. They are IT and help desk personnel as well as two managers. We also have a team that focuses on cybersecurity and information protection.

Our local Microsoft team helped with the installation.

We're on a three-year standard license. We do have to pay for licensing.

We haven't looked at other solutions. We prefer sticking with Azure.

We're customers and end-users.

We use both the cloud and on-premises. 

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's very good, however, it has room to grow.

I'd highly recommend the solution to other individuals and organizations.