Microsoft Azure Reviews

The typical use case is where you are trying to avoid investing in a solution that you are only going to be using on a limited basis. You need a pay-as-you-go solution where you can have access when you need it, but you don't have to make a major long-term investment. For example, say you need a software application but you want someone to build that application for you, and you don't want to invest in hardware or networking or other things for on-premise deployment. You can have your solution hosted on the cloud on the Azure platform so that it can be accessed from anywhere and you don't need someone to take care of it or maintain it. You can access your software application from your home or wherever without having to worry about the server going down or anything like that.
In these cases, a cloud-based platform like Azure or Amazon Web Services can be useful.

Azure is very user-friendly. I was able to create some database servers really fast. The user interface is intuitive. I don't work on the networking or firewall side of things. So I'm not familiar with those areas. 

Some of the capabilities available in an on-premise SQL Server aren't available in Azure. For instance, we found Azure Managed Instance to be lacking in certain aspects. One of our clients decided to stay on-premise rather than migrate to Azure because of this reason. Maybe Microsoft is working on building these capabilities in the future, and we are unaware. 

I've been using Microsoft Azure for a couple of years.

With Azure's capabilities, like sharding, we can really scale it up. They also offer features to increase performance, such as the ability to switch between performance tiers as needed.

It's fairly easy, but it really depends on a lot of factors, such as the size of your application, how many databases you have and how many web servers you have. 

We outsource some of the work of the actual deployment to external consultants. And we don't do any work on the hardware side of things ourselves.

Azure uses enterprise licenses, and I believe they are on a yearly basis. One piece of feedback from other users I have heard from is that Azure is somewhat expensive, so I would advise anyone thinking about this solution to be aware of the cost. You need to take into account the configuration you are going with or it could turn out to be a more expensive solution than you anticipated. Sometimes, I feel that it may not be very straightforward for a consumer to estimate the cost. It's important to be clear in terms of your budget and what you're actually purchasing.

I would rate it eight out of 10.

We are using Microsoft Azure for the UAT environment and data warehousing purposes.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft Azure is scalable.

We have 12,000 users using this solution.

I use other cloud services, such as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud services.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have a team of 30 that does the implementation of the solution.

We are on a monthly subscription for Microsoft Azure and the cost is more expensive than some of the competitors, such as Amazon AWS. They should be more competitive with other solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Azure a seven out of ten.

We use Microsoft Azure for different use cases. For example, we are hosting our corporate website on Azure. We are a software development company and we have hundreds of development and testing environments in Azure. Additionally, we use different Microsoft services, such as Office 365 and Azure Active Directory. A lot of our services are based on these technologies.

We are using Microsoft Azure because our organization uses a lot of Microsoft solutions. We have used Microsoft technology for a long time and we have internal engineers with great capability that understand the technology. This is why Azure is the best for us.

The quality of some components of Microsoft Azure is not that great. For example, Microsoft has not fixed issues in Microsoft Teams for many years. There are well-known issues that are submitted by customers two years ago and they still are not fixed.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately four years.

Microsoft Azure is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have hundreds of users using this solution in my organization.

The technical support has been great.

We use Google GCP and AWS by Amazon.

The initial setup is not a problem it is similar to competitors, such as AWS.

The pricing of Microsoft Azure is not very flexible.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

We're using Azure Premium P1 and it hosts our website and most of the applications we use. We are an airline company and for some of our enterprise apps, it enables things like single sign-on and hosts most of our virtual machines, as well as some of our web servers for the on-prem application. Our customer mobile app for purchasing tickets is for that purpose but we also use it for enterprise apps. I use Minecraft for my email security, but I integrate it with Azure to incorporate the single sign-on, as well as for multifactor authentication in my Office 365 environment, and the productive Parti app. I'm an IT security specialist and we are customers of Azure.

The feature I appreciate is that everything is basically shift forward from a security standpoint. Most of our systems are integrated with Azure for authentication purposes. Given that I'm a security specialist I use it for that purpose. The rest of the team uses it more for things like application deployment. I also use it to determine sign-ons, and things like compliance to devices. 

Microsoft allows you, via Azure, to have different authentication methods. You can use the Microsoft Authenticator app, text or voice, or something called a FIDO, which is like a USB security key. Unfortunately, the authentication method only allows me to have up to 90 users, and there are 2,300 people in the company. When I have to push multifactor authentication, I cannot specify certain users for the authenticator app. It forces me to lock it down and say conditional access only allowed.

Another issue I have is that Microsoft notifies me retroactively about certain things. For example, when a user sends an email with over 200 recipients, it can take half an hour for me to get a notification but sometimes it can take 24 hours. I have the same issue when it comes to things like phishing attempts. It's a problem. 

I've been using Azure for three years. 

The solution is stable, although I'd like some advance warning when they make changes. It can sometimes take hours to update so that if I have a user using multifactor authentication and I take them off, it can take up to an hour for it to take effect.

Technical support is very good. 

I can only speak from my own experience and I have many Microsoft certificates, including as a Microsoft solution architect expert in Azure, so it might be easier for me than it is for others. I tend to do a lot of things on the app and I use it on a daily basis. Even if I don't know where something is, the documentation on techniques, everything is there. I wasn't involved in the deployment at this company but in my previous position, it took a couple of days, not very long. Microsoft provided support. It's just a matter of configuring the tenant.

I would recommend Azure because there's a lot of documentation available and a lot of user guides, it has everything. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We use Microsoft Azure for our IDB. That is our primary use, but we also have a certain degree of MDM through Microsoft.

It does what it is supposed to do, and what we expected of it. That's the key benefit. Being cloud-based saves the provisioning aspect of an on-premises solution.

The support subscription models need improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for a couple of years.

We are using the latest version.

Microsoft Azure is a stable solution.

As far as we have expanded it, it is scalable. It's a startup company, we haven't scaled it to a significant number of people yet.

We have between 100 and 150 people in our organization who use Microsoft Azure.

I don't think that we will expand our usage at the moment.

I have contacted technical support on one occasion. My biggest issue with the technical support of Microsoft is when we had an issue that was product-related and it was difficult to get support on the subscription level we were on. In order to try to get support, we were told that we needed to upgrade. It was quite frustrating that an issue with their product required an upgrade to get serviced when it was a failure that they were responsible for.

It's not a question of knowledge, the knowledge was there. Access to that knowledge and the subscription model they were trying to put in place was the issue.

I used to work for Oracle. My previous experience was with Oracle Enterprise Manager.

I wasn't present or involved at the time of installation. I came along later. I started with the company after that.

Licensing fees are paid monthly.

We are currently in the process of deploying Zabbix to cover our monitoring needs. We have used other monitoring products which come with certain components.

From my point of view, it would depend on the type of solution and everything they were trying to encompass. In our case, it made sense to go with Azure. I think that for other companies, I would recommend that it's a good solution, but that depends on what problem you are trying to solve. It also depends on what infrastructure is already in place, and whether you want to have a lot of disparate systems communicating, or whether you want to consolidate that to a specific vendor. But for the purposes of what we needed Azure to do, it does the job. However, we don't use all of the MS Apps functionality.

It does the job, but it doesn't wow me. I am pretty happy with it. I don't get overly excited about it, but I am not disappointed with it. I would rate Microsoft Azure a six out of ten.

We are customers of Microsoft and I'm the IT technical manager. 

The most valuable feature for me is the high level of availability and the 99% uptime of the system. I also appreciate the technical simplicity of the system in terms of implementation.

I'm currently based in the Philippines and the availability of services locally could be improved. Technically speaking, I'd like to see more flexibility in terms of storage or resource allocation. Resourcing is currently quite fixed so that if you want to move between level two and level three resources, or customize resources, you can't do that. The discrepancy in terms of costing is around $200. If they improved flexibility for selecting resources it would be easier for us to get the costing approved.

I've been using this solution for around two years. 

The solution is stable, one of the most reliable in the Philippines. The downside is that currently all the services are outside the country. Singapore and Hong Kong provide the closest service but we have laws that prohibit certain amounts of data residing in other countries. None of that affects stability. 

One of the key takes from using cloud services is scalability and flexibility. If a company hits some roadblocks financially, they can reduce infrastructure and also reduce what they use in the cloud lowering the cost. 

I've had several outages or major issues and I've had good experience with technical support. They resolved the problems in less than a day. The only downside is that in the Philippines you're dealing with the vendor and not Microsoft direct. I have two steps of support; if the vendor can't provide the support, then they escalate to Microsoft. 

The initial setup is quite simple. We currently have 20 users on the infrastructure side in addition to 20+ developers.

We have difficulty in getting the costing approved. We pay for a virtual machine and the resources currently implemented there, then we need a license from Microsoft Windows OS and the database itself. In our latest license purchase, the manager approved a monthly fee of around $2,000 for the resources we use. If you're going to the cloud, that's currently included in the cost and will be less if you have the software assurance from Microsoft; on-prem is more expensive.

The big takeaway on this product is the high availability of the system on cloud and reduction of on-prem costing. There are no concerns about the electrical doing some redundancy in between, cooling, purchasing, procurement of IT equipment. Instead of budgeting based on CAPEX, we're doing it from an OPEX point of view. One of the key takes for moving to the cloud is the cost. You can leverage with the cloud and let go of some things required to maintain a system on-prem, the kinds of things that alleviate some complexity in doing maintenance of the system. The solution is suitable for any size company. 

I highly recommend Microsoft Azure. Everyone knows Microsoft so the learning curve is easier. I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

It has multiple features that can be used from the start.

It is easy to use.

I would like to see support for the applications that are currently in place. Ideally, Microsoft Azure should be compatible with the applications that we are using in my environment.

I am not using Microsoft Azure, but I have been doing an assessment for the last five years.

I am using the latest version.

It's a stable product.

Microsoft Azure is a scalable solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

The installation is handled by another team. I was not involved in the installation of this solution.

As of now, there are no monthly or yearly subscription fees.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

We don't use DevOps; we just use the Azure Cloud platform. The solution is primarily used for PaaS and FaaS.

The solution has been very stable.

We find the product to be scalable. 

The security network inside of the information on the network is very good.

Technical support, from what I understand, is quite helpful and we speak with them regularly.

There aren't really any issues with the product itself. For us, the problems are organizational and the processes inside the company, which uses Azure, aren't as clear. They need to define a good process and a good implementation strategy going forward. We only really have issues with what they want to do, and not the technology itself. Basically, the technology is not the problem. It is just the way we want to use it.

It would always be nice to have even more integration capabilities.

A company needs to have strong finance managers. It could cost a lot if you haven't got a finance function inside each company.

The installation process is complex. 

The pricing could always be better and a bit more standardized.

I've been using the solution for five years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable and reliable. The performance is good. It's not buggy. there aren't glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The product has been very scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

At this time, I'm not sure exactly how many people are directly using the solution.

While I haven't personally used technical support, our company does have a technical account manager on the Azure side and we are coordinating each week to identify all the topics we need to address - including our disaster recovery plan, which is important to the company right now. 

We did not previously use a different solution before we chose to work with Azure. 

The installation process is not very straightforward. 

When you want to install with a higher level of security inside the infrastructure, nothing communicates. Therefore, engineering security and network engineers need to understand what they have to do exactly, and what the problem is. With Aure, there's a learning curve for installation. You need to work with it for at least one year before you get comfortable enough and are able to troubleshoot and configure everything relatively well.

The solution has the potential to be expensive if you as a company are not careful as to how you use it. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. For me, it's a perfect product and I enjoy its capabilities. 

I would recommend this solution to other users and organizations.