Azure Stack Reviews

The solution is geared towards customers with large Microsoft footprints, in which it is very advanced. There is tight integration in respect of Microsoft workloads and extremely intelligent performance. Customers can use it to run SQL Server, Active Directory, VDI, Windows Server and other workloads. Many users use it for their dynamics, although I am not aware of a lot of deployments with SAP HANA. One who has a 60 or 70 percent footprint in the data center with Microsoft can save a lot. 

Azure Stack is a really good product when it comes to the functionality and the Azure Stack offer. Its most attractive feature is the licensing. The virtualization is in-built and free and it offers almost all the functionalities someone looks for from the Azure platform. 

Now that the solution is transitioning to a hybrid cloud approach, the licensing is not determined by the number of instances and this can result in huge savings. 

A subscription model customer will not need to do much up front purchasing. He can obtain all the up to date features offered on public cloud and grow at the rate he feels is best, with the attendant savings. 

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.

I have around two years of experience with Azure Stack. 

The solution is certainly stable. 

The solution is definitely scalable. 

Installation is straightforward and not very involved. It can even be automated. 

The deployment was straightforward and really nice. While creating a system and configuring a cluster is possible, it would be really beneficial to do this in the reverse, since the cluster can be pushed in using the hardware management ID. 

While deployment is straightforward, it would require a good skill set with Microsoft technologies and a certain amount of networking knowledge to handle any trouble which may arise. 

The licensing is one of the solution's most attractive features. 

Subscription model customers need not make large expenditures on upfront purchasing. 

A customer must purchase the software needed for Microsoft support, if he wishes to have this. This would incur a monthly fee. But, the upcoming Azure Stack HCl, which is hybrid cloud, does not involve an upfront purchase, only a subscription-based fee. 

I work with Lenovo as a consultant, which means I handle deployment for others. 

We have a handlful of customers, most of whom are using Microsoft products, but some of whom use Windows. Many go with the Azure Stack solution. 

I would recommend the solution to others. 

I rate Azure Stack as an eight out of ten. 

I recommend Azure Stack 100% for hybrid cases, dev & test, banking, financial (banking, insurance) , healthcare, public sector.

Also, The assessments include the following standards:

•PCI-DSS addresses the payment card industry.

•CSA Cloud Control Matrix is a comprehensive mapping across multiple standards, including FedRAMP Moderate, ISO27001, HIPAA, HITRUST, ITAR, NIST SP800-53, and others.

•FedRAMP High for government customers.

The compliance documentation can be found on the Microsoft Service Trust Portal. The compliance guides are a protected resource and require you to sign in with your Azure cloud service credentials.

The main pillars, on which Binbox is now developing, are Cloud Solutions (public, private and hybrid Cloud) using Azure and our DataCenters (built on state-of-the-art technology), Microsoft 365 and Binbox Managed Services (including 24/7/365 support). These being said, the Azure stack has come to complete our service portfolio like a glove.

The most valuable features that make Azure Stack different are low latency (<9 ms, high performance), data sovereignty, cloud readiness, public Azure features in the private cloud. Considering all the features, the quality of service / price ratio is superior compared to any cloud option.

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

Binbox Global Services has been using Azure Stack since 2018 when we deployed the first Azure Stack in Central and Eastern Europe. We were the second Microsoft partener that deployed an Azure Stack in Europe.

Now we have 7+ Azure Stacks and other Azure Stacks dedicated to Public Sector.

Azure Stack is stable. 

Azure Stack Hub provides on-demand, scalable computing resources.

The initial setup was a little complicated but not too much. 

We went through both a private vendor and Microsoft. The private vendor handled one part of the deployment; a Microsoft team did another. They both taught us how to manage Azure Stack. We have a large team of technical engineers who received Azure Stack certification. They know Azure Stack very well. Overall, it was not hard for us to deploy. 

We're getting more serious with Office 365 now. We start from the mailbox, the mail server exchange, and then we also have SharePoint. We have migrated all the local network drives, shared drives, home drives, to Office 365 SharePoint. We have been making use of the document library for sharing, and this year, we've started to use more of Microsoft Teams as a kind of collaboration, for online meetings within the organization and also to communicate with our students. Microsoft Teams is not the only software that we use, we also use Zoom for class meetings, and then Microsoft Teams for team meetings, really.

As an education provider, we have many students — over a thousand students actually; they are also the users of this domain. We also have 250 permanent and casual staff, it's quite a big number.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

At this stage, we are quite pleased with Office 365 Azure. To me, Azure offers a pathway for dealing with the active directory, and for storing all our Office 365 information assets.

Technical support is quick and responsive. I find that whenever I encounter an error (sometimes it's really the system errors or something that I didn't know how to do), the customer support is quite helpful. We get good support from Microsoft in terms of Office 365.

Take today, for example, we have a worldwide issue (maybe just Australia), and our Office 365 cloud authentication components were down for almost an hour. Thankfully, customer support helped us rectify that problem very quickly.

A consultant helped us with the implementation back in 2018.

I would only recommend this solution to smaller organizations like ours because I cannot really speculate what big issues that the bigger organizations will face. For a small or medium-sized college, it's quite good — I can't see any negative sides. In particular, our staff and students don't really use our computers. That means they are bringing their own devices and using their own computers. Because of Office 365, they don't need to come here (to campus) and they don't need to connect to any kind of VPN in order to access their emails or order their course materials or even the information that we provide on the internet, for that matter. Everything is on the cloud.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten — strictly because I have nothing to compare it to.

Not sure

move to cloud - improved by no need to maintain hardware

We've had a lot of issues with the solution as of late. We aren't very happy with it right now.

The stability is okay.

You can scale the solution if you need to.

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.

I've been using the solution for a while, however, we started having issues with the solution in May of 2020.

The stability is okay, however, there are a few glitches here and there. 

The scalability is okay. However, AWS is easier to scale. With AWS, you don't have to update your CPU and RAM. Everything's done for you.

In terms of technical support, it's very bad. We don't have a guy who is good at helping us, in our company, so we have to rely on the Shanghai team. The one person who supports us is in Shanghai.

We are relying on Shanghai technical support to help to create dashboards or whatever we need. Moving forward, we need a good technical guy in-house to help us. I cannot rely on Shanghai every time. 

Shanghai also seems to have two teams, however, I don't understand why. There's no direct number to the right people you have to reach, and the customer team we find to be quite bad. We're not overly satisfied with the level of service we've been provided so far.

The initial setup wasn't as easy as AWS, which has a much simpler deployment.

We ran into issues in terms of migration. Not everything was fully migrated, originally, and that caused us a lot of problems. It's still not quite set up how I would like it to be.

I've looked into AWS, which is more user friendly, and is a solution I would prefer to move over to. Not only is it always easier for us too manage by another provision, it's a lot faster. Azure is slower. 

Honestly, if I were to compare the two, I'd say that AWS is much better. It's so much easier to deal with and easier to understand. It's also easier to deploy and has a shorter learning curve overall. On top of that, AWS provides 20% of the traffic to the site. You don't need to update your processor for CPU and RAM. They do all of that for free. There's just way more up-sides to AWS than Azure, unfortunately.

Azure is just average. I'd rate it five out of ten. As an end-user, I find it far too difficult to manage, and it's not really worth the effort, especially when there are other solutions that make it so much easier.

I use a lot of services in Azure.  I have worked with completely isolated environments, building infrastructure from scratch using Terraform, Chef, Puppet, and other such tools.

The Platform as a Service (Paas) environment is the most valuable feature.

The Web App service is very valuable.

It is helpful from a security point of view because we can create our own isolated, private environments that contain virtual networks, and we can put security rules in place. We can also specify application rules, which is something that is also useful.

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.

I have about three years of experience with Azure, on and off.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Azure Stack is to start looking into DevOps early. There are a lot of things that can be done using the portal, and people tend to follow this process because it is easy. It's true that this approach may get things done fast, but it will only get you so far. Working with the DevOps capabilities, such as automation with Terraform, should be done sooner rather than later.

Every cloud has its pros and cons.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have an application that is working on Azure Stack. It is a Microsoft application that we wrote for our customers. 

Azure Stack is easy to use. Its major benefit is that it doesn't need its infrastructure. We didn't face any issues integrating it with our infrastructure. 

The product needs to improve its pricing. 

Azure Stack is stable and I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The tool is scalable. We have one customer working with it. 

The solution's customer service is fine. 

Depending on your setup, the tool's deployment can be complex and take a few hours to complete. I need to select the services and resources to deploy the tool. Though I have a team, only one engineer works on the product. 

I am using my Microsoft license, and it costs monthly. You need to pay additional costs apart from the standard costs. 

We are in the process of obtaining co-pilots to integrate AI into our infrastructure. I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten. 

We use Azure Stack for migration, application modernization, and cloud-native modernization.

Azure Stack's pricing could be improved.

I have been working with Azure Stack for around four to five years.

I rate Azure Stack a nine out of ten for stability.

Azure Stack is a very scalable solution.

I rate Azure Stack ten out of ten for scalability.

Azure Stack’s initial setup is easy.

Azure Stack is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I would recommend Azure Stack to other users.

Overall, I rate Azure Stack a nine and a half out of ten.

Our company's customers consume the products installed from Azure Stack, so that is the usage of Azure Stack for our company. Speaking about Azure Stack from a financial perspective, if I have to talk about ERR, it is approximately 4,000 USD per month.

The most valuable features of the solution are related to anything and everything in data and analytics, including data management and Azure ML.

I think the monitoring and operational part, including more administration, must be simplified to simplify user adoption. The challenge in Azure Stack begins at an individual level when you try to monitor every service from Azure Stack that gets consumed. The more the configuration capacity is available in Azure Stack, the more configurable it becomes while becoming easier at a user level and administrator level, thereby helping to optimize the consumption cost.

With the road map of Azure Stack, I have, everything looks great. Looking at the way Azure Stack has matured in the market, I feel that the roadmap of Azure Stack is planned pretty well by Azure's product managers.

I have experience with Azure Stack for three to four years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Considering the administration part and scope for improvement, I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten since it needs improvement at a user level and administration level regarding its consumption. The administrator does have all the rights, but then there should be some level of configuration needed if you go at an application level or at a service level where a user is using native capabilities of Azure should have an option for the administrator to extend it to the end user also.

There are around 15 users of Azure Stack in my company.

I do contact the solution's technical support when the need for it arises. The solution's technical support is great since, in our company, we get answers to most of our questions, and most of our queries get resolved with the help of the documentation itself. At least at our company's end, based on the services we are working on, we are less likely to depend on the solution's technical support.

The initial setup of Azure Stack is simple.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

Azure Stack is a medium-priced product, so it is not overpriced, but the prices may be higher for certain services.

Based on the secondary data or information we got in our company based on the initial evaluation we did, I think the way the instances are spread and made available across the globe makes Azure Stack a relatively easier product compared to its competitors. Azure Stack becomes easier to adopt with the new GDPR and the country-level data privacy or security rules implemented.

I recommend Azure Stack to those planning to use it. Most of our company's customers who use Azure Stack are happy.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.