What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure?

There is room for improvement in the pricing structure, user interface design (UI/UX), clear navigation, and documentation support of Microsoft Azure.

I haven't been involved with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services, but I hope there will be more training sessions for them. Other companies and platforms provide technical webinars and training on their websites. I wish I could learn more about CI/CD, but the resources aren't readily available. I haven't been able to find webinars or training sessions. Maybe I'm not searching correctly, or the information isn't presented clearly. The price should be lower. My company used the demo product because of the cost. Price is an important point for all clients and companies who want to obtain this solution. I also have a question: what about review platforms for forensic technology? Is there a way to integrate these platforms with Azure? It would be great to have a web-based review platform integrated with Azure. Currently, we use a third-party software to launch this review platform. Is there any way to review documents within a web-based solution in Azure? This is something I wonder about.

Sometimes, I have issues configuring settings, setting up policies, and communicating with others on Microsoft Azure. Pricing is high, especially if you plan to use it on a larger scale, with more teams, or want to include additional features. The costs can increase significantly as you add more features and expand usage.

The solution’s initial setup is a bit complex.

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.

The stability could be improved.

Pricing is very expensive.

Microsoft Azure needs to improve its customization capabilities. Each organization has unique tasks and fields that it wants to use. Additionally, the search functionality could be more flexible.

There is room for improvement in the product's AI capabilities and real-time data processing features.

One thing I find is that there are updates happening all the time, but they don't always roll out information about the changes. For example, the way to connect to Git repositories six months ago was different from how it is now. It would be good if the platform incorporated some kind of announcement system, like "This process has changed, here's the revised method." That would be really helpful. So, update announcements should be there.

We have reported some bugs we encountered, and it would be good if those bugs were resolved more quickly.

The only thing is regarding the management of multi-cloud environments. That's not really possible. So basically, it's wonderful if you manage Microsoft clearly and if you manage Microsoft Azure, but if you need to consume external services and have a global overview of all your consumption, it's not the case. Google, for instance, has tools that help you manage multiple environments, which makes sense because Google is really the cloud provider. So that's why they need to be compliant with the others. But for sure, Microsoft's approach is different, and it's wonderful when you're one hundred percent on Azure. But if you'd like to have something more of a multi-cloud strategy, that's a bit of a gap where they could improve.

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.

The tool should add an interface that is similar to AWS.

We use most Azure services. However, there are limitations with a few services, like the Standard Load Balancer. It lacks features like utilization visibility compared to traditional load balancers. Some older services need better log visibility. Additionally, limitations can be restrictive. For example, the Standard Load Balancer currently lacks the ability to proactively monitor its own health. Additionally, through the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model, Microsoft support isn't ideal. We often need to escalate to outsourced technical support, who rely on documentation. I often need to remind them that we follow the documentation and educate them on the issue. I rarely reach the actual Microsoft back-end engineers. Despite this, the service uptime and monitoring are good.

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.

The solution should be more intuitive and provide better support. We often do not receive frequent updates or comprehensive support, even as partners. Additionally, we are exploring the AI functionality within Azure. We are looking to collaborate with Microsoft to activate AI features in Azure to fulfill AI-related tasks requested by our clients.

Everything needs improvement. The tool must constantly improve to provide a better experience. The security must be improved. The scalability could also be improved.

The tool needs to improve its navigation.

In Azure, there are so many things. Especially when dealing with different regions. Suppose we are far from a region and using it over the internet, then probably more Edge Zones in nearby cities would help. This would give easier access with no delay or latency. Right now, the problem in many remote areas is they may have low-bandwidth internet connections. This can make it difficult to access large services that require more bandwidth to download data and such. So, if the service were closer, it would be faster to access. At least they could access it easily. Again, there are many other suggestions from a technical perspective on different services. But this is just from a user's perspective, and user demographics can create challenges. Other users with very good access might not have latency or other issues, but they might have operational challenges. For example, let's say ExpressRoute. It's very expensive and mainly available for enterprise customers. Suppose individual users want that kind of dedicated connectivity over a service provider like Airtel or Vodafone and have an ExpressRoute from their phone, but is there any availability for a lower-cost option? Because it's very expensive as well, if there were any such services available at a lower cost, then that would really help customers, especially SMBs, to have more consistent and reliable applications. The main improvement I expect is capacity improvement. For example, live streaming applications require a lot of backend computing power. During events like football matches, millions of requests can occur per second. Existing services might not be sufficient to handle this. We need to know the maximum scalability based on data center capacity limitations. In some cases, we have to deny customer requests due to insufficient capacity. So, improved scalability is a key area for development, and I'm sure other cloud providers face similar challenges. There are a lot of services already in Azure, but from a regular user's perspective, improvements can be made to specific services and features. For example, in Kubernetes, initially, it was limited. You could only create a Kubernetes cluster in one subnet. If all the IPs in that subnet were used, you couldn't expand that subscription. That was an issue, but it's been addressed. Now, you can increase the number of nodes by creating a new node pool in the same cluster with additional subnets. Improvements like this feature-based approach can be applied to many services. Another key area for improvement is the Azure load balancer. Currently, it only supports virtual machines (VMs) running in the same virtual network (vNet) on the backend. They should definitely support machines or IPs running on-premises (prem) or in other Azure VNets. GCP and AWS already support that. So, Azure Load Balancer should support that as well because being able to provide support is a very basic requirement or a valid request from any customer. These kinds of feature requests can be improved from a cloud service provider's perspective.

The third-party data-sharing features must be improved. It will be useful for users who use other cloud providers.

One significant area for improvement in Microsoft Azure is the cost associated with its services. While integrating services from different vendors, the perceived costs are high, with occasional confusion about specific charges, especially in data transfer scenarios between regions. This cost factor poses a barrier for small companies, and they could simplify the process and reevaluate pricing structures.

The solution’s learning curve could be improved.

One area where Microsoft Azure could improve is in offering a broader range of pre-built plugins and tools compared to AWS. While Azure excels in certain capabilities like text-to-voice and voice-to-text, it may lack robust support for handling diverse languages effectively, such as local dialects or combinations of languages like Chinese and English. Enhancing flexibility and language support could make Azure more competitive in diverse global markets like Singapore and the Philippines. Additionally, a feature I would like to see added to Azure in the future is support for a native graph database technology. While AWS offers Neptune for graph databases, Azure currently lacks a similar offering.

From the perspective of a user who has a partnership relationship with Microsoft, I would want Microsoft Azure to provide some credits that can be used to test and validate Microsoft’s different solutions since it is an area where the product lacks.

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.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

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.

The subscriptions are complicated. The process is not user-friendly.

I would recommend some enhancement regarding integration features.

The security feature in the solution is an area that needs to be improved.

I would like to see Internet content filtering included.

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.

Microsoft Azure Backup and recovery solution needs to be integrated with other private cloud systems like VMware to allow the solution scale and extend function across multi-hypervisor platform

It should have cost optimization tools. Customers are required to use third-party applications to avoid usage complications. Also, charging on downloads is not a good option, especially when it moves to a production server.

Virtual services might be improved by adding more rules for the validation of protocols and peripheral elements in security assurance. This feature could help to gain more visibility in compliance validation using cross-referencing between firewalls and legacy systems. By example, only mobile devices with Windows at phone, laptops, or tablets running either Windows 10 or Windows Mobile can print using Windows Server Hybrid Cloud Print, and this possibility cannot apply to another devices due to the feature uses an UNC path. UNC means for Universal Naming Convention, a standard for identifying servers, printers and other resources in a network. The UNC uses double slashes or backslashes to precede the name of the computer.

Microsoft Azure could improve by having more virtual machine operating systems available.

We have deployed multiple solutions into Microsoft Azure. In most of the cases we augment our Application monitoring "in-house" developed tool to monitor things like garbage collection, IIS queuing. If these attributes and parameters could be included as part of the Azure Monitor it would be great.

In a month, there is a plan to increase pricing, which is something we are not looking forward to.

The integration pipeline could be a bit more broad in terms of applications. Additionally, some companies require third parties to develop on their cloud. it would be interesting to see if it would be possible to provide another company with restricted access to their analytical tech stack.

Microsoft Azure could improve by having the availability be 100%. Which is difficult, but not impossible. In the future, there should be more automation.

More integration with other platforms is what I would like included in the next release for this solution.

Their backup strategy is a little complex which racks up the VM to other sole storage areas. This should be improved.

We work mostly with the data services and the SQL database features. We like the optimisation recommendations we get such as creation of indexes etc. What I would like to see further is some basic data profiling stats or charts representing data stored to be integrated in the SQL database services instead of using other services such as the Azure Data Catalog.

The management portal can be confusing sometimes. We have difficulty navigating the menus because the terminology is unclear, especially when referring to the content or actionable items.

The documentation can be outdated and is not as clear in Microsoft Azure as it is in AWS or Google.

The microservices and analytics of Azure are good areas that could be improved. Microsoft Azure has technology compatible with OpenShift from backtrack, but I would like it if they could evaluate another vendor of technology of microservices like Rancher to integrate with.

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 would like to see it more easily accessible.

Azure could be improved with better security. The world is changing and their security could be better. Compared to five years ago, many of these cloud systems are a lot better, especially since you can set up a private cloud and configure your services to make it more secure.

I'd like to see improvements with the price calculator tool. I would like to get a forward-looking view of the services I want to cost. For example, if I want a bigger machine with two CPU's and eight gigabytes of RAM, maybe the calculator can allow me to input my recipe, the tool can then give me a list of virtual machines that have that specification, and it will be easier for me to choose the virtual machine I want. There are no additional features at this time I can suggest for future releases.

Any time you use a cloud service, there are increased security risks. If you want more security, you have to have private hosting.

It could be more flexible. If you look at all Mircosoft products, they are not up to the mark. For example, Azure Ready doesn't provide the same kind of access a domain administrator has and the kind of flexibility that they have when using Active Directory. Microsoft support could be better. Their service could also be better. For example, specific policies for templates suddenly become unavailable. When I checked, they said that certain things might be withdrawn based on customer feedback. This happened once or twice, and it wasn't available at all for five days, it just went down.

We work with Azure, which is okay, but very clunky and complex. It lacks fluidity and is not intuitive. This can be problematic and require one to work with external consultants. Things can depend on the client. Not everything can be known in advance and there may be a need to make changes to the interface. Changes which are made to the functionality are not always intuitive. As such, while the solution offers very good functionality, its intuitiveness, in respect of user experience and configuration, is not the best. I should note that these are minor issues and I do not work with Azure very much, there being only a couple environments in which we employ it. We see the same issue with Microsoft, which is not an intuitive platform. The ways in which the various components are placed seems to be illogical. There are different screens and end-configurations. In my familiary with Microsoft, a decision was reached to do things this way and there is no way to alter this. As such, the solution could definitely be more intuitive.

The solution could improve by having more security features around my data and the platform.

The support subscription models need improvement.

No product is perfect, there is always room for improvement. The solution to the market and the guidance for the customer should be streamlined. From a customer perspective, it can be complex. It's a bit abstract for the customer. They need to provide comprehensive and easy-to-understand guidelines for the customers to implement. The initial setup could be simplified. The customization could be improved. I would like things to be easy for the customers and partners.

The solution could improve by being more user-friendly.

You don't get support from Microsoft very easily as compared to other solutions. For example, AWS. If I reach out to AWS, their PDM team is very quick to respond. The Microsoft Azure team does not. The downtime could be a bit better. AWS has less downtime. The solution needs to scale as well as AWS, which scales much better.

The solution could improve by providing better tutorials and documentation. There was a point when I was trying to understand how the board works and there was not any documentation that could articulate it properly. We had a whole team who had to go online to check other sources in order to understand.

Because it has a lot of features, a person just coming into Microsoft Azure might feel that it is a bit complex. Once you are familiarized with it, they will find that it is organized in a structured way. It's a bit clunky at first.

There aren't limitations that come to mind. Whatever they have planned for the solution in the future, I will be happy with it. The solution could always work to reduce its costs. It would be ideal if the solution could offer more non-Microsoft-related integration capabilities.

Use of the solution could be easier. It is too complex. The solution is not sufficiently informative and there is a need to wade through much information. Moreover, we find it lacking when it comes to active dashboards. This is problematic when looking to Teams, as it does not allow one to know what is transpiring in real time, such as when there are concurrent conferences. This information only becomes available the following day.

The cost of the product is too high. It would be ideal if they could lower it a bit for their customers.

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.

The solution could be easier to use. However, when comparing it to AWS it is a bit easier. In an upcoming release, the interface could improve.

I believe the cost management and billing section features could be improved because sometimes it may seem somewhat complicated to find certain settings to set up a threshold for resource consumption and track expenses in real-time.

They should include a cybersecurity feature to improve the protection of the systems. They could do better in terms of the pricing model. Its price keeps on changing. Their technical support can also be better.

There could be more documentation and video tutorials to incorporate each and every feature. This way one can easily get the knowledge and implement it.

1.One is not able to upload custom images in azure and not able to access windows client images. This can be improved 2. It moves your business’ compute power from your data center or office to the cloud. As with most cloud service providers, Azure needs to be expertly managed and maintained, which includes patching and server monitoring.

There was a time when the solution was updated on their side and all of our functions stopped working. This issue could be worked on to prevent it from happening in the future. They must give us the information of when they are going to updates on the platform side so that we can take the appropriate measures on our side as well. We would like to see more enhancements in the Azure Migrate services in the future.

It could be cheaper.

The cost is something that could be improved. There's not much clarity regarding the price range. We'll create a VM and then at the end of the month, we'll receive a bill with various costs from different locations — it's confusing. Integration with other cloud environments can be tricky at times.

The pricing needs to be a bit lower. It's an expensive solution right now. In future releases, I would like to see Microsoft offer personal desktop environments in a virtual solution. Citrix, for example, now offers this as an option.

When we are doing transfers of records in large amounts, for example, petabytes of data or few long datasets, the performance should not degrade as it does. I am working on big data platforms like Informatica and others and even though there are terabytes of data being transferred it does it immediately. However, in this solution, I would like the performance to be there when building a large dataset to integrate the data.

I think Azure Active Directory and also the backup solutions provided in Azure need to be improved by Microsoft. The backup solution is not a very enterprise solution, and it is very simple. I think in comparison with other backup solutions like Nakivo and Veeam Backup, it can be improved to have a lot of options. Along with this, one of the lack of options in Azure is managing antiviruses in virtual machines in the Azure environment. For example, if we have a lot of virtual machines on-premises and have to migrate them in Azure, there is no handy tool for the central management of antivirus software in all virtual machines in Azure. On-premises, we have a lot of options like Kaspersky, Norton, and a lot of others, but in the Azure environment, you are limited to Windows ATP. Windows ATP solutions are limited and can be improved by Microsoft, specifically the central management of the GUI for configuring agents on virtual machines. I think Microsoft Azure should provide more innovation and new services to get better performance in the market. The documentation for how to connect to CLI could also be improved.

The solution should emulate what MuleSoft is doing. At the moment MuleSoft has a lot of other features compared to Azure API integration. Just the coverage of the features, for example, could improve. Azure should offer more coverage of the features.

The design of the platform is not so easy to navigate. It's not very user-friendly. Some services are more difficult to use in AWS and GCP. I have projects on the three clouds, and some things are easier to do on AWS. On the other hand, using Databricks on Azure is easy, as they are integrated well. However, some products are more difficult to use than other products.

Sometimes the Azure Calculator doesn't have a good way to do a higher estimate, because for any organization there are sometimes issues with the application sites, but I know that the logs are not the real time and there are issues with login synchronization. It cam sometimes take more than five minutes for that information to reach the Azure application side. I'd like to see integration with other lifecycle managing rules because with Azure DevOps, it's straightforward, but the system is painful sometimes.

Talking about improvement is like a double-edged sword. We like that they have the new capabilities, but sometimes they're deprecating capabilities faster than we can handle. If we had to improve it, we would want to stay on some of these older capabilities a bit longer. It's a brilliant platform for our staff to be more agile and more efficient but probably doesn't match with us in terms of maturity. For example, they offer this tagging capability, but they keep introducing new platforms without it. We've become heavily reliant on tagging, but in the case of NetApp, they introduced it into the environment, and now we're not able to get the showback off of that. If they introduce new capabilities, they have to have all the features and functions on that new capability. They're not very good at that. If they introduce new capabilities, all the feature sets on these new capabilities should be available immediately. From my perspective, that's where they need to improve.

Its subscription price could be cheaper.

I think the cloud interface could be improved.

They should optimize their pricing so that we can use more features. I would also like to see more auditing and more security for the Blob storage feature. From a technical point, it has very good features for Microsoft products, but for non-Microsoft products, it may have some limitations. I have mostly worked with Windows-based integration, and now I am trying to use it for open-source systems. It is good but not as easy as Microsoft products.

From a security perspective, it could be improved. A little bit of automation would also be nice.

I believe that some of the services need to be available on the on-premises version and not only based on the cloud. There are some security issues in the cloud that cannot be solved. Some countries will not allow you to store certain types of data on the cloud.

The technical support could be improved. When we leave tickets, it can take some days before the issue is dealt with.

I honestly can't think of anything that needs to be improved.

A few different vendors from Fortinet, from Barracuda, from Forcepoint, all use infrastructure from Azure from time to time. A problem with Azure is that the architecture that they have is not really compliant — not really connecting with the endpoint Cloud. It's a different type of architecture, so that's a mistake from Microsoft. Hopefully, they will fix it soon. It could be more secure actually. Microsoft Defender is not very secure. The platform is also a bit slow, to be honest. It takes a few seconds to load. Although, it does update quickly now. It's one-click — Microsoft takes four seconds and Google takes two and a half. It's minimal. Better integration with other vendors and third-party systems would be a nice change.

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.

It is constantly updating. There are weekly releases, sometimes daily releases, and there should be fewer that are consolidated into one.

The solution is not particularly user friendly so that could be improved. With Microsoft Azure it's quite difficult to do anything freely or try my hand at something new. I think the solution is also lacking in security. I'd like to see the option of a free account for carrying out a POC and the ability to play around with the solution without any restrictions.

I would like to see improved migration tools. It is improving week by week. They just need to make sure that they keep up with the new functionality provided in other clouds.

It is pretty secure, but it can always be more secure.

It would be advantageous if the dashboard had more clarity, in terms of the visibility that it provides. The challenge that we are facing has to do with resources and the grouping of them. We have different services that we use and we cannot see all of them until we filter the resource group. Having inbuilt security would be an improvement. As it is now, Microsoft has a sentinel as a security tool, where you need to integrate it.

I would like to see this solution support integration.

The cost is a big issue, it can quickly go up if you don't control things. We've set up a system that shuts down machines regularly so we don't run up costs. Sometimes our development teams start up machines and forget to shut them down, and we see our costs go up quite rapidly with monthly surcharges. It would be helpful if Microsoft didn't change the control panels quite so often. It means we need to retrain personnel whenever things change and that seems to have an impact on our IT teams.

We would like it to be cheaper. As a customer, we always want to pay less.

Integrate as a service. A lot of Microsoft software licensing options aren’t yet in Azure. Also, the ability to integrate with other technologies, such as other options on the market based on RISC Technologies.

I can't say that we have any complaints in terms of features or lack of capabilities within the product. Over the last two years, I'd say it's been so far so good. It would be ideal if they could reduce costs a bit. Right now, we find the product to be expensive.

They can add more documentation about the solution.

We need more customization and support for doing so. I would like to see more customization on the DevOps side.

At times, the support is terrible. It is not bad all of the time, but many times when we have contacted them, there are juniors without refined knowledge. We have had instances where it takes a long time to solve just a single problem.

There should be more language options for the Azure Functions apps. It supports programming languages, but there are only a few options. It could have more programming languages.

I would like to see all of the cloud providers be more compatible with each other. All of the big organizations, such as large manufacturing and banking and financials, use Azure, while other places will use Google Cloud to AWS. Compatability between these is important.

The solution could be a bit more intuitive and easier to use. The documentation could be a bit better. It could be more clear and accessible. It would be good to know if the person answering the questions was a Microsoft employee or just another user. The pricing in our region can be a bit high.

The solution needs to be easier to configure in the future. Right now, it's a bit difficult to accomplish. Technical support could be better. They need to be more responsive. The documentation should be more accessible. It's hard to find what we need right now. It would be helpful if there was more data science or AI implemented in future versions. The product needs to implement more API capabilities.

I would like to see better integration with other products.

The licensing model is not ideal. It is not very useful in predicting actual costs. Sometimes we found that we could not accurately predict how much specific products will cost the company in the future. Just now, for example, we want to start using Log Analytics for Office 365, however, we don't know the final price. It's inconvenient for us as we cannot predict the budget and it puts off making a decision. For Microsoft, it's very disadvantagous. The solution could use mutual segmentation for servers. It would be ideal if you could constitute something like five or 15 groups among the groups of different computers inside Azure. If you could get something like logical groups of servers outside the mutual servers, it would be an improvement. Sometimes we want to start and do a penetration test. If, for example, we're planning new security scanning for our customers. You have to inform Microsoft that you want to start a penetration test. If you have regular scans Microsoft should allow regular scanning, without having to plan and to ask for approval from the Microsoft side every time. When it's meant to be a regular occurrence, it's very inconvenient for us.

If the price were reduced then it would be an improvement.

It should have a better hybrid-cloud central analysis. Their support service also needs to be improved. Our main concern is support calls. Our issue is basically related to the technical functionality of the services that we use. It doesn't behave as expected, and support often fails to solve the problem.

The level of authorization or authorization cascading can be improved. We have the most powerful admins and then we have sub-admins, but the level of authorization is not that easy to handle or manage.

For some use cases, Microsoft Azure is okay and working, but it is lacking features and we cannot implement it fully. Talking from a networking perspective, when you create a file or a rule in Azure and you want to view this IP group, sometimes the way it is displayed on the GUI, you don't see the name of the group. At a minimum, I should be able to see the name of the group. They need to improve the GUI with respect to creating files or files. In summary, on that GUI view for firewall rules creation, the IP groups that are chosen in the firewall are not easily seen. If I want to track, for example, a soft IP group, and mistakingly I click the wrong thing, then it's a problem. They need to improve it so that you can just view it, read-only, and then edit it later if needed.

Some of the dashboard features can be improved. Some of the backup solutions for SAP are not compatible. For example, we have a Sybase database running, and Azure does not have an agent tool for connecting with it. This means that we have to use a third-party tool to properly backup our SAP Sybase system.

As compared to AWS, Azure can improve its functionality. In terms of the feature list, it is still lacking a bit as compared to AWS. AWS supports lots of types of operating systems, which Azure is still catching up with. Azure is mainly focused on the Windows system, and it is not yet there in terms of integration with other operating systems like Linux, Unix. Azure is slowly catching up.

The initial setup is quite complex because of the number of options that are available.

Right now, in Azure, with the solution they offer, it's a bit complicated. The application response time in particular consumes a lot of memory in terms of the CPU and application response time. The control administration, every single control, every single application or service, has its independent dashboard. It's a bit complex to set up. It's simple to set up, however, when you want a metric for tracking or reporting, it's a bit difficult. We've had issues with the login feature and have been looking into other solutions due to that ongoing problem. The solution needs a more integrated password feature.

It would be nice if there was an on-premises version of the solution, and it wasn't just cloud-based. Oracle, for example, has both capabilities. Some people don't understand the cloud, or are hesitant, and this might prevent them from adopting the product. Also, migrating to the cloud can bring a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of trouble to some companies. Some prefer that their data is not moved from the premises, or have requirements to that effect. If Microsoft could address these concerns, that would be ideal. The solution has a lot of terms of services. These should be simplified.

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.

In the next release, I would like to see better security.

The price could be improved as well as the interface speed, and technical support.

The pricing can be reduced.

I find that in many cases it's more expensive than AWS, and for no good reason. The pricing itself is also quite difficult to comprehend, it's not easy to know the total cost and not worth checking the calculator because the outcome is going to be totally different anyhow. I also find it difficult that they are specific to x86 and x64 machines, I haven't found any ARM-based virtual machine images that I could run in my IP test lab, which would be a great boost for productivity because I could run the internal pipeline in the cloud and would not have to divert to locally installed devices. If they want to be serious with IT devices then they should find a way of deploying ARM-based devices to Azure, to get more freedom of choice with virtual machines and services. It would be hardware virtual machine image offerings to other platforms, not only PC-based or x86-based. It would make my life much easier.

Azure could be made more user-friendly. For example, the configuration wizard should be more intuitive for the users.

They are a bit closed on the customization side. If they open the customization then it will be very good. It covers pretty much the similar problems that we face in many areas of Azure. If we are planning to use some of the Azure applications within our organization, there are some places that we need to complain about a complaint. Because of the design of Microsoft, we were not able to make this complaint. So, we are not able to use that interface.

Dashboards and reporting could be improved.

They should enable more other products to enable other commercial products as a Pack services, from the database side, more from the security perspective. Some of the databases don't have the features that Azure SQL has. Those parts have to enabled. There were also a lot of constraints with the serverless parts. They are far behind compared to AWS.

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 think the pricing model could be improved. I have that clarity with AWS but with Azure it's not that easy. If I am building a solution on Azure, the first question that stakeholders will ask me is about the cost. If I'm using multiple services of Azure, then how do I figure that out given that it's all on cloud. Technically, I would say there could definitely be improvement on the AutoML part, which is the machine learning component of Azure. I made a comparison between AutoML versus DataRobot, another vendor that provides machine learning. DataRobot is definitely ahead of Azure AutoML. Of course that could be because I'm using the licensed version of DataRobot versus the free version of AutoML but there does seem to be a gap.

The cost of Microsoft Azure could be lowered. The subscription licensing is very complex and we would like to have it simplified. The ease of configuration and use should be improved.

Microsoft Azure can be pretty advanced and difficult to understand. I would like it to be simplified. The licensing especially needs to be simplified.

Improvements need to be made with respect to the availability of third-party services. I would like to see more advanced functionality in terms of information security.

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.

Better logging part when deployments are crashed, even when the entire cluster is crashed.

I get the impression there are a number of services offered by AWS that are not yet available on Azure, but it seems to be catching up pretty fast.

Being a big item, it has it's own share of bugs. I had a great deal of difficulty establishing the account at first.

We are looking for the Azure to get involved in the case of other applications, like the Java application. Because it is predefined and has been set by Microsoft, who is providing better compatibility to the .NET application, so we are looking for the same from Azure for the Android app. Therefore, we are looking for better compatibility and scalability.

I would like to see more databases on the cloud, what they call today Big Data should be there. I think it's going in the right direction.