Microsoft Azure File Storage Reviews

We are using Microsoft Azure File Storage for file access.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure File Storage is the cloud file storage capability.

The support could improve.

I have been using Microsoft Azure File Storage for approximately six years.

We looked into the stability before we chose this solution and it has great stability.

I rate the stability of Microsoft Azure File Storage a nine out of ten.

We have less than 500 people using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft Azure File Storage an eight out of ten.

The support needs to improve. When we contacted support we received different answers to resolute our issue which was not helpful.

I rate the support from Microsoft Azure File Storage a three out of ten.

Negative

The majority of people are primarily using the Microsoft ecosystem. If I were not part of that ecosystem today, I would undoubtedly require an alternative to Microsoft Azure File Storage. In fact, I would likely opt for either Google or AWS instead.

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure File Storage is simple. Someone with basic technical knowledge can handle the task.

We did the deployment of the solution ourselves.

The price of Microsoft Azure File Storage is expensive, we do not know exactly how the price is calculated.

I rate the price of Microsoft Azure File Storage five out of ten.

We use four people for the maintenance of the solution.

I rate Microsoft Azure File Storage an eight out of ten.

This solution is mainly used for banking processes. 

The solution is easy to use, it's very user-friendly and intuitive. 

Licensing costs are expensive and I'd like to see the price come down.

We've been using this solution for four years. 

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

The scalability is good. 

We've used the technical support and it's good. 

Positive

The deployment of this solution is not carried out by my team but I believe the implementation required five people. 

Licensing costs are quite expensive, although I believe the more users you have, the less expensive it becomes. 

This is becoming a very widely used platform throughout the world. I think the sooner people get on to it, the better it will be for their organization. I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We use the solution in our organization for its archival functionality. We are essentially archiving data with Microsoft Azure File Storage. Even though we have the applications and the storage, we are replicating our data into different data storages.

Feature-wise, it is an easily accessible solution since Microsoft is integrating everything into its products nowadays.

The solution is expensive. Considering the enterprise licensing required for the solution, the cost of the solution is an area where the product needs improvement.

I have been working on Microsoft Azure File Storage for around five to ten years. Presently, I am working on the latest version of the solution. I am an end user of the solution. I also work as an integrator for the solution.

We don't face any stability issues with the solution in our organization. I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

It is a very scalable solution. I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. Around ten to fifteen of our customers are using the solution.

In my experience with the solution's technical support team, I would say it was okay since I faced no difficulties. I rate the solution's technical support team an eight out of ten.

Positive

We use Commvault and Veeam in our organization. The reason to use Microsoft Azure File Storage is that it is a cloud solution. Though the other ones are also cloud solutions, Microsoft offers better pricing compared to them.

The solution's initial setup process was straightforward.

Around two weeks were needed for the solution's deployment process. Also, the deployment process is something which one can do by themselves.

Only one technical person is required to deploy and maintain the solution.

We need a consultant with knowledge of integration and EDI-related processes to implement the solution.

I am unsure if I have seen an ROI using the solution since I don't look into the commercial part.

One needs to pay according to the storage they plan to use in the solution. The payments are to be made yearly. It is usually monthly, but we opted for yearly subscriptions in our company. In general, all cloud solutions are expensive. Ultimately the solution of the cost depends upon how one plans to use it, which includes features like data usage backup and other such data-related stuff. So the cost can differ from customer to customer.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it, especially if they require a cheap cloud solution. We haven't seen any issues with the solution in our organization since it works fine. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I used Microsoft Azure File Storage for a project focused on deploying a Windows server and connecting that server to my Active Directory domain. I synchronized the file server with Microsoft Azure File Storage. I then set up and connected the disc storage with storage in the cloud to back up the data. My intent for using the solution was to back up data in the cloud. My company doesn't use Microsoft Azure File Storage, but other organizations, government, and non-government could be using it. The usage of the solution depends on whether an organization can integrate Microsoft Azure File Storage into its environment.

I like that Microsoft Azure File Storage works fine and is quick to deploy. It's also easy to connect to it, particularly when connecting it with my on-premise file servers. Microsoft Azure File Storage doesn't give me any connection issues.

Microsoft Azure File Storage needs more integrations.

I encountered a problem with the solution: Microsoft said you could directly integrate Azure file share on your PC by enabling that feature in Microsoft Azure File Storage. It worked at first, but then, when I restarted my PC, that feature stopped working. I did that only for research purposes, so I wonder if Microsoft fixed that bug or if that Azure file share integration feature in Microsoft Azure File Storage was designed wrong.

In the future, I also want to see GRC added to the portal to integrate it with Microsoft Azure File Storage and other Azure services. If you enroll or sign up for Azure services, your country may not have GRC available in the portal, so you may have to choose a strange country, for example, Kenya, to activate credit. Having GRC helps many students, enterprises, and users easily access Microsoft Azure File Storage.

Microsoft Azure File Storage is a stable solution.

Microsoft Azure File Storage has good scalability. Scalability-wise, it's a nine out of ten.

My rating for the technical support for Microsoft Azure File Storage is nine out of ten.

I'm a Microsoft Student Ambassador, so I get free access to Microsoft technologies, and if I need support, I can contact other members or Microsoft directly. I can ask the community via Microsoft Teams. I'm an MVP nominee in the Windows Insider program, so I can ask a question and get an answer quickly, so I rated support as nine.

Positive

It was my first time using a public cloud storage service, such as Microsoft Azure File Storage. It was also my first time using Azure to deploy a web application. The other tool I used wasn't in the public cloud storage but in the data visualization niche. That was Microsoft Power BI, which I connected to a database on Azure and an API gateway.

Microsoft Azure File Storage deployment is quick but depends on your connection. A good connection takes one or two clicks, and the deployment time also depends on the data you have in Microsoft Azure File Storage.

If you have more data, then that takes more time. Still, Microsoft has improved the capabilities, quality, and protocol to help enterprises transfer even massive amounts of data many times. I don't have much data, though, just around 500MB.

I deployed Microsoft Azure File Storage. I didn't need a consultant because I referred to the documentation. Microsoft documentation gives information on different services. For example, if you type "Azure cloud services," you'll find various topics on cloud services. If you choose, for example, "file sync," you'll see information on how to start, the steps you need to take, how to integrate, etc. If you face any issue following the steps in the documentation, you can always Google it.

The licensing cost for Microsoft Azure File Storage is very low. I viewed my bill from Azure on the portal, and the solution didn't cost much.

Microsoft Azure File Storage has a reasonable price. It's cheap, price-wise.

I recommend Microsoft Azure File Storage to other people.

My Microsoft Azure File Storage rating is a nine on a scale of one to ten.

As an enterprise solution architect, I have most often used Microsoft Azure File Storage as a file storage solution in projects that have required the migration of organizational data from on-premises to the public cloud. In these cases, the migration is usually a one-time transfer of data to Azure File Storage, where the data then resides going forward.

Essentially, with any content management platforms that we implement for ourselves or our customers, Azure File Storage will almost certainly play a part in the final solution. For example, we are now building a new knowledge management hub as an internal platform for solution architects, and it is based on Azure. 

That said, at my company we tend to take a pretty agnostic view when it comes to products and vendors, and with some of the ITSM or content management solutions that we recommend such as those offered by ServiceNow and AIOps, we will deploy on both AWS and Azure as these are our preferred partners. 

During the course of my work, I have also dealt with other Azure products such as Azure Data Factory, but data warehousing is only one part of what I do, as my role is more aligned to business development and solution architecture. We have a platform focused on data solutions, comprising AI data warehousing, recording, analytics, etc., and this kind of platform would be more likely to be using Azure Data Factory for all of the data lakes across the various public and private cloud providers.

Right now, my role is a bit broader and more generalist, and I would usually have someone well-versed in the Azure cloud actually building the solutions. I am more interested in the economics of Azure solutions, and I have found a lot of customers are asking, "Can you bring in some expertise on cloud economics?" So this is definitely an area of interest and a core focus for me.

The biggest advantage of Azure File Storage vis-à-vis other public cloud storage providers, and why we recommend Azure first and foremost, is that many of our customers have partnerships with Microsoft and so they have access to better cloud economics. Compared to AWS, we have found that (from a customer perspective) Azure is much more competitive.

Another advantage of Azure is the fact that it integrates so well with our customers' existing Active Directory implementation, which really saves a lot of time when integrating on-premises environments with public cloud environments. With Azure, it's a seamless integration.

One thing that Azure File Storage could help us with is some kind of impact assessment. When we talk to some of our larger customers who have between 500 and 1,000 applications, we normally do an assessment of all these applications and then tell them which ones are ready to be lifted and shifted, and which ones need to re-architected. It would really help if Azure File Storage could come up with a better way to give estimations of the total investment required, including all costs incurred during the migration.

For some aspects of file storage, there will only be approximate requirements, but for others there are empirical formulas, and it would greatly assist the solution architects and customers to have access to better assessments in this area. For instance, in one case we had, there was an unexpected escalation of costs which were not factored in from the beginning. Of course, this wasn't Azure's fault, but an impact assessment to prevent this kind of occurrence would definitely help. And, I believe, it would be a win-win for both us and Azure, because it would help Azure bring the right customers to the table.

Another thing I could see being useful is some form of diagnostic tool with perhaps a list of errors that can potentially happen. From a solution architect perspective, I would want to give my customers some pointers about possible pitfalls, and a diagnostic tool like this would make it much easier for me.

From an internal team perspective, there's also lot of improvements that could be done when it comes to Active Directory. We find a lot of errors occur in our Single Sign-On integration with AD because not all scenarios are integrated from isolated networks, and they are often not configured to be isolated during the project. So, at times, when you go live, you'll suddenly hear someone screaming. To prevent these errors, I would propose a type of auto-discovery feature that is automated to some extent.

Finally, a typical issue that we see during file migrations is failed transfers for whatever reason (e.g. network connection issues), and the current methods that Azure employs for dealing with these failures could be improved upon. My suggestion would be some kind of transfer management solution, especially one that is enabled for mobile. With this, there might be a type of dashboard where I would be able to easily see what percentage of the transfer has been completed, and take the actions necessary to go back and restart the transfer at the point where it failed. Anything more intuitive than the current solution would help us during file transfer failures.

I have worked with Azure File Storage for one year.

Overall, we don't have any complaints when it comes to stability.

I can confirm that Azure is a reliably scalable platform. However, with the non-production environments that we normally use, Azure File Storage isn't that easy to scale during development in real-world scenarios.

To elaborate, we have one engagement where we are supporting up to 140,000 VMs, and our non-production environment load comprises the simultaneous use of many people working on it at a high velocity and with many requests per second. Whereas, in a production environment, many of the processes are automated and predictable, and there are various cloud management tools available to help.

I have never interacted with Azure technical support, since the alliance we have between Microsoft and the delivery teams means that they are the only ones who interact when it comes to support.

The setup of Azure File Storage is undertaken by the delivery team, but from a pre-sales perspective I haven't heard anything untoward regarding the setup, or anything that suggests it is very challenging. We have a partnership with Microsoft, so whenever we have challenges with setup or implementation, we invoke our alliance and somebody from Microsoft comes along to help us.

There are fewer hidden costs involved compared to other solutions, and when our customer is already a Microsoft partner, they typically have access to more affordable fees.

We are somewhat vendor-agnostic so we also use other cloud storage solutions, such as those from AWS. However, we always recommend Azure for a number of reasons such as that there are fewer hidden costs involved, as well as the fact that our customers are typically partners of Microsoft and thus get access to better economics as a result.

Our customers in the retail industry are a bit hesitant about AWS, and will usually go with them for specific workloads which require a lot of algorithms and domain-specific expertise.

While there are some areas for improvement, Azure File storage is, overall, a highly comprehensive solution which ticks all the boxes for us. For cloud file storage and file transfers, it is definitely our preferred solution.

I would rate Microsoft Azure File Storage an eight out of ten.

I generally help customers use Microsoft Azure File Storage primarily for a lot of purposes, including the storage of files and enhancing storage security. There are private endpoints and private DNS resolver, which is basically a private endpoint resolver that resolves the IP address of the private endpoints internally. It is then further mapped within the application. It also has short file storage which accesses the storage according to the minimum privilege and rights assigned to that storage. It has networking facilities and firewall options to safeguard public data. It also has a SaaS token that can be generated around the storage and shared storage which enables customers to share their files through Azure File Storage. 

Flexible stroage in the cloud is very use and can be cheap and programmaticlay deployed

There are various features attached to the solution, including firewall options to safeguard it. The profile management option is another valuable feature that allows us to manage the profiles and secure them. It allows the user to understand what configuration has been made to the  Azure virtual desktop. Blob Table Container Tables Queues Elastic San & Azure NetApp Files are also lots of other features that can be explored.

There is always going to be room for improvement. Certain use cases will evolve where file storage is used with visual ID and group mapping. As long as the dynamic mapping is working seamlessly, there aren’t any changes needed in Microsoft Azure File Storage. As of now, I've got no such recommendations.

Importing and exporting data needs to have a bit more documentation. Recently, Microsoft has actually stepped up and provided some training about securing data but they need to have a solution in case the data needs to be migrated. They need to include a service to securely transfer the data through Microsoft and encrypt it.

I have been working with Microsoft Azure File Storage for a couple of years.

It is very rare to get an outage in Azure. If there are any issues, the data is replicated into the DR region, allowing you to access it depending on the skew that is actually applied. 

Microsoft Azure File Storage can scale well because of its dynamic nature. It's quite scalable because of a file agent that is set on-premise and helps to scale out pretty much really. Azure can create large storage accounts and manage that, replicating the data securely.

Medium to large enterprises can mostly use file storage because they have a lot of data and Microsoft's features are evolving every day, making it a fit match.

I have direct experience with customer service at Microsoft. Usually, it involved raising a ticket. However, we as consultants are expected to fix the client’s problems first, and if there is a bug, then we raise the ticket. My experience with customer support is pretty good. They've always responded very quickly, and I never had to follow up with them. 

Positive

Net App

The setup is easy and easily doable. As long as the steps recommended by Microsoft are applied, it is not very complex. 

Usually, it is our customers who implement the solution. In most cases, they don’t require assistance if they follow the guidelines laid by Microsoft. However, in case there is any kind of assistance required, we help them to set it up. Usually, it is deployed on the cloud, but there are multiple ways to mimic the deployment and in some cases, they require it.

The pricing is usually dependent on your storage requirements. Overall, I believe Microsoft Azure File Storage's price is reasonable. 

On Premises San Storage

As long as one knows how to implement and secure it, Microsoft Azure File Storage can be used efficiently. There aren’t any particular recommendations, because a lot of it is already in place.

Microsoft has been implementing these scenarios but they can work a bit more around the SaaS token scenario. If they can simplify that, it can be great as not enough people use the SaaS tokens. I think this needs to be explained on an engineering level. If they include it, customers can use and choose this facility.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Azure File Storage an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for migrating local file servers and for file storage of on-premise systems.

The immutable storage features are valuable. It works very well.

It’s a challenge to find the right support person. The technical support must be improved.

I have been using the solution for three years.

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

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. Our customers are not very large companies. The product is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses.

If we are in the right queue, the support is very good. If we have the right support person, the support is quite good.

The initial setup is easy, straightforward, and quick.

I did the deployment myself. I have deployed the tool as a consultant for other companies.

The product must improve its price.

I am a service provider for Microsoft. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Microsoft Azure File Storage has multiple functionalities, and you can use it as a source, but you may face some problems when contributing something in Azure. This is hard to do. The configuration in Azure doesn't help. This is okay, and it's not a big problem since I am not too aware of Azure resources. That's why I might have faced problems at first.

The solution is not user-friendly.

I have been using Microsoft Azure File Storage for a year.

It's a stable product.

The solution can be expanded because one can manage and install huge amounts of data in Azure. Those using the solution in my organization are using it for DevOps. We have around 20 users using the solution in my company.

I never faced any issues that prompted me to contact technical support.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

To those looking into using the solution, I recommend getting Azure documentation. This will help you to configure the solution with other tools.

Owing to the fact that some features might get added in the future after sending my notes to Azure, I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.