Azure Stack Reviews

We use the solution to run our ERP software and mail servers.

The product has impacted our edge computing needs in a good way.

The best thing about the product is that it is very complex. Microsoft has a solution for everything we need. We just need to use it. The tool has simplified our application development. Integrating and managing on-premises resources using Azure Stack is easier than other platforms like Canonical and OpenShift. The solution is more mature than its competitors.

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.

I have been using the solution for four to five years.

The tool is very stable.

The tool is very scalable. We have around 50 users in our organization.

The tool is very simple to deploy. The deployment takes two to three hours. It is easy to maintain the product. We need a team of two to three persons with expertise in networking, storage and server setup, virtualization, and Kubernetes.

The pricing model is consumption-based. We pay as we go. Our overall cost is lower. Some things in the pricing model are a bit confusing. The vendor has two pricing systems. One is for Azure Stack, which is on the cloud. We also install and use it on-premises. The difference in price for the two is not very clear most of the time in the documentation. The tool is affordable.

Overall, Azure is better than Canonical and OpenShift. The overall portfolio is better. Canonical and OpenShift have limited product lines. I also need to use third-party products along with them. With Azure, everything can be installed from the dashboard, and Microsoft has a very rich product portfolio.

We are using Microsoft products. We also bundle it with some of the solutions we provide to our customers. We don't need compliance at this moment. Azure Stack is not very popular in the HCI industry. We have used VMware and Nutanix. Compared to them, Azure Stack is a better solution. When it comes to Kubernetes, Microsoft is a leader in Gartner. It is very mature. Overall, I rate the products a nine out of ten.

Our businesses have diverse scopes, leading to a wide range of requirements that we use this solution for. These encompass everything from the initial onboarding process in an on-premises environment to aspects like security, analytics, and integration.

The two most crucial aspects of it revolve around connectivity and security. In terms of connectivity, it's vital to ensure seamless external connections, bridging on-premises and cloud environments through features such as site-to-site VPNs and Access Routes. On the other hand, we're prioritizing security, especially with the use of Azure Firewall, including its premium features, as well as SQM.

If I were to mention an area that could be enhanced, it might be technical support, as there have been observations that the response time is not as fast as some of its competitors like Google.

I have been using it for a couple of years now.

It provides excellent stability.

This solution is highly scalable, with both direct and indirect users numbering over fifty thousand within my business.

Our experience with their customer support has been excellent. We have an enterprise contract with negotiated terms that include valuable support from subject matter experts and architects. However, there is room for improvement in terms of response times, which we believe could be enhanced. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

We use both Azure and AWS simultaneously in various areas, allowing us to offer a choice to different business units seeking cloud implementation. Both platforms work effectively, and the choice between them depends on the specific needs of the business or project. I don't see inherent advantages or disadvantages between them as they both provide similar capabilities for businesses to carry out their work. If a business is looking for streamlined processes, Azure might be the better choice, while AWS excels in highly technical enablement.

The initial setup is straightforward and simplified, particularly when following the available documentation.

The deployment time varies depending on the specific scenarios and features within Azure that we plan to use. Setting up services and connectivity features like extra routes, side-to-side VPNs, and VPN gateways can be time-consuming. Once these components are in place, the core infrastructure within Azure is well-designed, and enabling a particular feature typically takes no more than approximately two weeks.

Azure stands out for its flexibility with pay-as-you-go options.

My primary advice would be that if your organization or a client decides to embark on an Azure journey, it's essential to start by going through the Microsoft Learn portal. This resource will provide you with a strong foundation and a head start in understanding and using it effectively. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Our company provides local cloud services with multiple platforms and Azure Stack is one of our platforms.

The most valuable thing about Azure Stack Hub is that it provides the same control panel for managing cloud services and provides the same experience we have with global Azure, for the supported services.

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 are a Microsoft CSP and have been using Azure Stack Hub for three years. Our company uses it and our customers use it as well.

We had some issues with Azure's stability but overall I would say that the solution is stable. I give it an eight out of ten. You need to have a stable infrastructure. In case of severe data center issues that affect the platform stability, Microsoft and hardware vendor support have very competent teams and will help you bring the cluster online.

Azure Stack scalability is limited by rack. You can scale and add more capacity within the same rack, but it is limited to 16 nodes. Or add more regions (racks). Scalability is very limited by constraints. I give it a seven out of ten.

The technical support is excellent but could use a little improvement when it comes to response time.

Positive

The initial deployment is done by Microsoft's partners/hardware vendors. It was quite straightforward for us because we just had to provide our tenant credentials, and network resources and start using the platform after it was deployed. It took about a week to deploy it and it was done by a systems engineer.

Deployment was done by a vendor team. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Azure itself is not very pricey since the most expensive parts are hardware and hardware support. We use a consumption-based model and it does not have a fixed time, we just pay for how long we use it. The cost of it depends on the workload. The starting price is $6 per vCPU for a Linux VM monthly, or $34 per vCPU per month for Windows machines.

My advice to new users would be to consider the business objectives, if you have a Microsoft environment, want to consolidate on a cloud platform, and have sovereign requirements. Apart from that, you need to focus on the value it brings to the operations, rather than the cost of the platform. It's a value approach. If you look at the convenience and speed of implementation, it adds value to the business. 

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

We use Azure Stack for everything, and it drives our entire business.

The solution's most valuable features are security, configurability, and recoverability.

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

I have been using Azure Stack for five years.

Microsoft has outages from time to time that affect everybody, and it takes the whole system down.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

Around 200 users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

It's very difficult to get our issues dealt with quickly because we're a small company.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is not complex, but it requires a lot of training. The solution's deployment took a few weeks because we built the entire company on the cloud.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a six out of ten.

Azure Stack is a very expensive solution. The costs are very opaque and coming out of control quite quickly.

Azure Stack is deployed on the cloud in our organization. Azure Stack is a very fast and flexible product. I would recommend the solution to other users because it is a safe and standard system.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We have used the solution for IPS, IDS, and security incident response. We have used Defender as an antivirus, anti-malware, and intrusion detection. We used Intune for endpoint management and endpoint detection response. We use Purview for insider threats, data leakage detection and response, and data classification.

You can use the Azure security policies to enforce your compliance objectives. We also used web firewalls and identity governance, which is a security feature or can be used as such.

The solution's front door and web application firewalls have proven most beneficial for our edge computing needs. The solution provides end-to-end comprehensive protection across the services.

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.

I have been using Azure Stack for eight years.

Sometimes, Microsoft services fail without warning. The solution sends you a warning, but it's not enough of a warning in advance, which they could improve. Sometimes, we would think our application failed, but it would actually be the underlying Microsoft services that failed.

Azure Stack is a highly scalable solution. Our organization had around 500 users using the solution. We had plans to increase its usage to minimize the use of third-party tools because of cost considerations.

Sometimes, the technical support was excellent, and sometimes, they knew nothing. It's not that the people on the support team were not good, but they were not necessarily well-informed about new services.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is usually straightforward. However, it's not simple unless you have experience in that field. The only complexity I encountered was integrating it with Business Intelligence (BI). However, that could have been my own ignorance about BI rather than Microsoft.

When I tried to scrape data out of the rest of the services and dump it into BI to analyze it, I didn't find it very helpful. I also didn't find the documentation helpful, but that's probably my ignorance. If I had known more about data analysis, I would probably have had an easier time.

The solution's deployment time took about nine months, but there were many significant enterprise-level applications to migrate. The holdup was more about the application team ensuring they could meet the business's needs before migrating.

To deploy the solution, you follow a typical business analysis process, where you gather requirements from the business, the cybersecurity team, or stakeholders. Then, you work in the cloud to find out how to meet those requirements using that solution. Earlier, you had to have a third-party VPN, but now they have their own VPN. The cloud was not quite mature until the last few years.

I find Azure Stack to be very costly. The people who manage the budgets are satisfied with the solution’s medium pricing, which is neither very expensive nor very cheap. I think the solution has a reasonably good value for what it provides.

The solution's integration with other Azure Services is extremely valuable. Since everything is designed to fit together, you don't have to do a lot of work to integrate the services with the security protections or vice versa.

The way the solution handles data sovereignty could use some work. You still need to do a lot of work to determine where the processing occurs. Suppose you have a Canadian residency requirement. Many services still have processing in the United States or Asia, where sensitive data can be an issue. It would be better if the tool were more forthright about where processing occurs or could actually move processing into the countries where sovereignty is required.

Some third-party tools were well-adapted for integration with the solution. However, this was the result of the third parties' work, not of Microsoft's. The third parties ensured that all the work was done to integrate them with Azure Stack.

The solution consistently provides support and integration. Azure Stack tries to consider and meet the needs of cybersecurity professionals as best it can. Also, I like how the tool adapted to shift left, where security became the responsibility of the whole IT team, and they met that need very well.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use Microsoft 365 for email, PowerPoint, Word, and Dynamics 365 for financial needs.

I appreciate that all the tools are available natively within Azure. It's all set up nicely. It's all minor.

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.  

I have been using this solution for a couple of years. I worked with it in my previous position and now in my current one.

So, it has been around five years. 

It is a stable solution.

For our use cases, the solution is scalable. There are around 300 end users in our company. We mostly work with medium-sized businesses. 

We don't have direct technical support with them; we go through our partners.

The initial setup is easy. It is in the clear. We have a multi-tenant environment. 

I can set it up in a few hours, but configuring everything may take a few days.

We have a service provider that handles the deployment and maintenance of the solution for us. Our experience with the provider was good.

Maintenance is easy and fairly straightforward, mainly point-and-click.

The licensing costs are expensive. I pay on a monthly basis. We pay through our managed partner. So, it's bundled with other services provided by our partner.

In the past, I used AWS. Personally, I prefer Azure Stack because it offers scalability across availability zones, elastic computing, and a robust marketplace with options for bringing your own license. It's user-friendly and has readily available scripts and patterns. Everything is there for me.

I would advise you to clearly define your objectives and what you want to get out of it. It may not be the silver bullet that you might be looking for, as it requires shared responsibility.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. If you look at the documentation set, there are rims and rims of it. You try to drive something from the console, and it's quite complex. It's not it's not easy and straightforward. You've gotta sit down and review it, look at the documentation, and work your way through it. It's not intuitive.

We use the solution for data lake and storage. We also use Fabric. We have some applications running in Oracle. We take the data from there and bring it into Azure for storage. We use Synapse Analytics to build the tables. We do the data analysis and data cleansing and visualize it using Power BI.

The product is easy to use. It is fantastic. It's integrated directly with Azure DevOps and Visual Studio. It is easy to integrate the product with other solutions. It makes our AI projects easier. We can use SQL or machine learning.

We face some challenges with database rebuilding.

I have been using the solution for six months.

The product is stable. I rate the stability an eight or nine out of ten. In the software industry, nothing is ten out of ten. Everything has room for improvement.

The product is very flexible and elastic. Around 100 developers use the solution in our organization.

The initial setup is very easy. We can use the cloud infrastructure and the Azure template to deploy the solution. Or else, we can use the GUI and click till the installation is finished. The ease of setup depends on how skillful the person is in deploying the product.

We also use tools like Power BI. The system should be dynamic after the process change. The data and table must be fully responsive dynamically. The rebuilt table command must be scheduled. After that, the statistics must be collected dynamically. Many people working with data management do not know this process and say that Azure Stack has delay issues.

The engineering team in our organization has ten people, including the manager. The machine learning and AI team has 15 people. The database, Oracle, and operating systems teams have 15 people each. I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

My company uses Azure Stack to host the records management software.

The most valuable features of the solution are scalability, ease of use, and its ongoing maintenance process that takes away a lot of trouble when one has to do an on-premises installation.

I feel that Azure Stack has so many different variables which are not very clear. Unless you have a great deal of knowledge or a really good integrator, you may encounter a few surprises when you begin with the implementation phase of Azure Stack. In general, the initial setup phase of Azure Stack is an area with concern that needs improvement. The initial setup affected me the most from the point of view of the cost structures related to Azure Stack.

I can't comment if I would like to see any additional functionalities added to the solution since I currently don't use even 10 percent of its capabilities.

I have been using Azure Stack for six months. My company just uses the product internally.

The product has remained stable so far in our company.

It is a scalable solution.

There are around 30 users of the product in our company, and I get it to the needs of approximately 250 clients of our company who use the solution.

My company does not necessarily plan to increase the use of the solution in the near future. The usage of the solution will organically grow if required.

I have faced no issues with the technical support provided by Microsoft. I haven't had direct contact with Microsoft since it is the vendor from Microsoft that provides me with good technical support. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I currently use Fortinet FortiGate.

I haven't previously worked with products similar to Azure Stack since every product in our company was deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution was initially deployed on an on-premises model, and currently, my company is shifting the product to the cloud.

The solution's implementation phase took place over a span of approximately two and a half months.

People from Azure managed the deployment of the solution in our company from their end, so I don't know the efforts people put in to deploy the solution.

I have a consultant who takes care of the deployment, configuration, and migration part of the solution. I haven't faced any issues with the solution's deployment, configuration, and migration phases since I got help from a third-party integrator, who was very helpful.

I have not seen any return on investment from the use of the solution in my company.

Azure Stack's price falls on the higher side of the spectrum. The licensing costs for Azure Stack in our region range somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 USD. Though my company makes monthly payments towards the licensing costs of Azure Stack, I have plans to purchase a three-year plan in the future. The licensing costs for Azure Stack include the cost of the additional facilities it provides, like maintenance and support.

I am satisfied with the overall product.

I recommend those who plan to use the product in the future to do their homework and learn everything about it before purchasing it.

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.