What needs improvement with Azure Stack?

The solution's transparency over cost management could be much easier because it's very difficult to manage costs.

You have vulnerability management tools as well. The way this solution gives you steps to follow to remediate vulnerability is not very well done. It can't be an idealized process. It needs to deal with what really exists and provide more support to people who are remediating. The main challenge with the tool for a security person is protecting the data in transit between the on-premises or hybrid application and the public cloud. Knowing how to move the data securely at a reasonable cost was difficult.

It is not easy to set up. Technical expertise is required.

Some tools do not run without the internet. If we have connectivity problems or need to install an application without the internet, we cannot do it.

Azure Stack's pricing could be improved.

There is room for improvement in terms of security. The security tooling could be better. It could be easy to drive. The alerts could be a lot quicker in delivery because it's coming out of Azure Stack, it's coming out of their tools. It it could could be a lot better. It could could be a lot more straightforward. Okay. Additionally, having clear pricing in the marketplace would be beneficial. In this marketplace, everything comes with a price tag. If something isn't initially priced, you can try it for free, but we'll let you know the cost after the trial period.

Azure Stack Hub could use some improvement when it comes to seamless support for disaster recovery scenarios or high availability regarding multi-regions (not including global Azure). With Azure Stack Hub, your expansion is limited. If you need to expand your infrastructure, you can't just expand the computing power or the storage capacity. You have to expand both since it is a hyper-converged solution. There are third-party solutions that would allow you to expand storage via iSCSI, but it involves setting configs on third-party systems too. The next release should have improved scalability in terms of having multiple stamps as part of the same region or having the capability to replicate workloads to multiple regions of Azure Stack Hub.

We have experience in Azure Stack. Internally, the cost increases when you use Azure Stack because you have to buy services from providers like HP, for instance. So, more or less, it's more profitable to use the non-Azure Stack cloud services servers. In some cases, we've seen that some financial software is not working correctly or compatible with Azure Stack. Many companies build this, but some third-party products may not be compatible with Azure Stack. So these are some areas of improvement. In future releases, there's some incompatibility with third-party software or connectors that need to be created.

Azure Stack doesn't have all the services available in Microsoft Azure. It would be useful if Azure Stack could be developed to be like Microsoft Azure with all the services. Although Microsoft manages it, not all of Microsoft Azure’s services are available on Azure Stack. When we try to build a solution on Azure Stack, there are some limitations with the services available, most of which are available on Microsoft Azure. Adding more services to Azure Stack will be beneficial for customers. The product doesn’t have a DR solution available locally. The product does not support a local DR either.

Certain elements are difficult to deploy.

The visibility of the solution's SDN feature and transmission policy needs improvement.

Azure Stack is an expensive product that should be made more cost-effective.

The solution could be less expensive. So many new features are added at a fast pace that it is sometimes hard to keep up with all the solution offers.

Overall support needs improvement because they are not agile across services.

I would like to see the AI side come to one hundred percent in the near future. I would love to see a more reliable SAP improved.

There's Azure SQL Database on the cloud for small loads, but now they're moving to Synapse, which has a combination of the storage plus the analytics.

From a security perspective, there are certain things which could be improved. We have that option of enabling the datacenter which sits on the Azure site. The solution is difficult to manage if this particular feature is disabled.

The fact that it is completely integrated into Azure, while positive, is also a downside.

I believe the only room for improvement is that I am based in Nairobi, if it has even a local node for Azure, I believe most customers will prefer that to reduce latencies and everything else when using the Azure Stack. They'll be better off if they can set up a local node in Nairobi, Kenya. There are local things specific to the Kenya market, which are integrated into local development platforms available in Kenya, which would be helpful if it could be integrated with Azure Stack. We have a solution called M-Pessa, for example. If that can be done on a regular basis, I believe it is time to look for customers who want to use that channel today.

It should be improved in terms of integrations. It could be integrated more with external tools. We have Azure Purview for governance, but that is for data governance. For code governance, we have to use SonarQube or WhiteSource for vulnerabilities and license management. We would like to have a native code compliance tool.

Microsoft is changing the Azure Stack interface all the time, so it's sometimes hard to find the functionality or the service you're looking for. A feature was in one place and now it has moved somewhere else. It's because the product is quickly evolving, so they're changing constantly. I understand, but it's difficult to find things when we don't use Azure every day. It's not a big issue.

Our only issue with Azure Stack so far is that the networking is very closed. You need to have the extended LAN to connect the internal LAN to the Azure Stack. Any connection we have needs site-to-site VPN connectivity instead of an internal connection, so Azure Stack has room for improvement in the networking area.

I would like to see better network integration. While they are working on security, several things can be brought in on the networking side, such as extending to networks stretching in between data centers. These are absent at the moment. It would be good to have a single control plane for the networking.

It would be great when Microsoft will enable WDI, AI and Cognitive Services in Azure Stack.

I would like to have access to more services and more functionality. In the future, I would like to see more machine learning features.

Having more options and customization would be an improvement.

We started to get issues in May of this year. We didn't know that the one side of Azure was not fully migrated. There's two Azure on-premise solutions in our organization. I needed to migrate everything that wasn't migrated over quickly. I needed someone who was knowledgable to assist to get it done. Therefore, I asked Windows and was looking into our budget. We told them to go ahead and do it, and that we had two thus far, one for memory, one for CPU, and that's all. I only wanted two point areas. I wanted my Azure to point to only one, however, now it's set up to point to two point areas, which is not what we want. The solution is not user friendly. I'd prefer to move over to AWS, which is much easier in this sense. The product could improve its manageability.

We need an expressway from a different network to allow for connectivity purposes. For example, If we want to have remote storage on-premises or off-site, I have to go through the public cloud. That is the only way. There is a dependency. They don't encourage having it on-premises in different networks. I have an HCI model hyper-converged infrastructure. It's a minimum of four nodes with Microsoft Azure and I want to attach additional storage, but I cannot attach it without connecting directly and finding a new network. There are limits to the bandwidth and sizing of the images. Kubernetes as a service is there, but not as a platform as a service. I would like to have a Kubernetes cluster in a PaaS. They have it in the Azure public cloud, but they haven't released it in the Azure Stack.

The user experience could be improved to make it more comfortable.

In PaaS Model, they are only offering MS SQL as a service, web applications as a service, and containers as a service. When it comes to containers, I could not find how to use the functionality. Recently, one of our customers wanted to have Sybase as the database for their SAP applications, but it was not in the Azure Stack Marketplace. It is closed and It doesn't allow you to customize networks or any new features. Better flexibility in the network is needed.

They can provide more integration with other services, such as components, open source, because I use these services.

There are a lot of services in Azure that are not stable. Azure Messaging services are in need of improvement. I would like to see better monitoring capability, as we have in Dynatrace and other APM tools. The functionality is there, but it is not as detailed as it is in other tools.

One of the problems is that systems still have to be developed and as things move forward, we have to build a lot of our Azure Stack solutions from scratch. It does not give you a complete, production-ready setup.

The price of the OCR could be more competitive with Google.

When you compare AWS to Azure adding on all the security components you require to protect your application and data AWS is by far the cheaper alternative, like the cost of Defender and ATPm, MCAS, ADFS, etc.

I can't think of any area in which the solution is currently lacking. The solution could use more training materials to help users understand how to use the product effectively. Online training would also be a beneficial addition to the product.

As far as what we would like to see added, there are no burning issues right now. If we are looking for certain areas of improvement and we want to have specific features or functions, the flexibility of the environment allows us to easily add the functionality we want. There are always things that you have to find out for yourself. That creates complexity. Could Microsoft make the product easier to use? Probably by adding more scenarios, but Microsoft already has guidelines on when to use what feature. In the area of training, Microsoft already offers a lot of opportunities to further your skills with its products. These resources make it possible to get started quickly. The product is never going to do your learning for you in that way. I do not have any recommendations as to how the product should be enhanced as some of that is the user's responsibility and opportunity.

If they could integrate with Jira, this would be very useful for someone using Jira and TFS. This would make it easier to use.

I would like to see better support for containers. Containers and the IoT hub that exists in Azure Stack should be usable on-premises.

The reporting for the interim monitoring purpose could be improved. Right now Windows Admin Center is on the level with Victor Server 2019. But we need to work on the same tool, so we provide them some code features on the same tool. It's very useful for any organization and an administrator. Additionally, customers need to consider Disaster Recovery. Microsoft tech is only providing support to Azure. We would like to see it available for other services and solutions on the cloud, too, as well as a solution for Oracle backup.

Pricing is always a hot topic, so the pricing can always improve. And I'm not too sure if the Microsoft technical capabilities are very good because I don't make use of it. So, for me personally, pricing would probably be the only factor that needs to improve. I also think the monitoring tools needs some improvement.

The solution should be more open to allowing access to other tools and environments. Technical support also needs a lot of improvement.