Microsoft Azure Reviews

Microsoft Azure is for customers who want to move to cloud-based solutions, take advantage of licensing e.g. hardware or software licensing benefits, and other cloud-related benefits, e.g. Azure container benefits, making their applications more scalable, etc.

This solution shows good performance. There were learning hiccups initially, but now it's okay.

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

We've been implementing Microsoft Azure for our customers for four years.

Microsoft Azure is a stable solution.

I found Microsoft Azure to be scalable.

We don't directly interact with technical support because the licenses are bought by our customers, so it's our customers who interact with them, but we didn't see any major issues with Microsoft Azure, on the ground.

As Microsoft Azure is a cloud-based solution, installation was easy.

Our team implemented this solution. The technical team, particularly those with knowledge about Microsoft Azure should be able to implement it well. We used our engineers to implement it.

We've been using different Microsoft solutions. Microsoft has solutions. It starts from Azure data sending, data storage, and other Azure related solutions. other Microsoft solutions that everybody uses include Office, Outlook, C#, .Net, etc., from the technical side.

It is our customers who use Microsoft Azure. They wanted to move to Microsoft Azure, so we moved them. We just maintain it for them, and also do the development and the support for their applications.

For people who want to start using this solution, if they are currently using the Microsoft Stack on-premises, moving to Microsoft Azure will be good.

'm giving Microsoft Azure a score of eight out of ten.

I am a technology consultant and pre-sales cloud solution architect.

These are the features I have found most valuable with Azure. For any particular cloud world, when we talk about the cloud computing model, it is all about agility, availability, how you are trying to scale up your environment, how you're providing high availability, your disaster recovery mechanism, and what is the service availability matrix that you're following? We then talk about the workloads which are being supported on the Microsoft platform. Then we come to the commercial side of those workloads. For example, if we are trying to migrate the Windows workload, then Microsoft Azure offers a lot of benefits for Windows and SQL licenses. We can include that in the picture while we are trying to draw a comparison between different providers. Because AWS does not provide that DAM facility, though there is something that they provide, but you need to put it on the installs, not on RDS. Make it easy to install.

The second thing about Azure is that if we talk about Gartner, IDC and Forrester, although AWS is leading the chart in the leader's quadrant, when we look at the recent growth and what companies are acquiring and how much business they are pulling in year to year, there is a greater spike in the Microsoft Azure growth as compared to AWS.

I have worked as a cloud solution architect in India and Microsoft Azure works on data centers. They have three different geographical locations where they put the data centers. So as per the ISO 27001 BSI compliance for DR, disaster recovery mechanism, you need to make sure that the primary and secondary data centers are separated by a geographical zone - which Microsoft Azure adheres to. That definitely makes it a good choice for the client who wants the data to be in India and to also follow the BSI compliance.

Other factors include the Azure Site Recovery. The ASR one-stop DR solution provides RPO and RTO. It also gives you failover and failback scenarios. AWS did not have that kind of platform earlier. They had DM, DMS and SMS for small scale and medium scale app and database migration, but they didn't have a one-stop DR solution. They recently acquired cloud in their platform. Microsoft Azure also recently acquired cloud. They have built that particular platform into their Azure Migrate, which is their cloud feasibilities function provider. If we need to do a feasibility assessment or dependency mapping, we can use that particular tool or the Azure Migrate. It's a very good tool. I use that tool for multiple things.

I am trying to draw a comparison between the two leading cloud providers.

When we try to do backup scenarios, Azure Site Recovery is supported with all kinds of platforms. But it is not capable when you are trying to do recovery of a database or a recovery of an application server which are already on HA, high availability. HA would mean that you have only done the clustering. If there was clustering there, then definitely the ASR does not support it. But if you don't have HA, if you don't have the clustering done, then definitely ASR would be supported in that particular scenario. You can also do big database migrations with the Azure Site Recovery if there is a single database. Otherwise, you can use native database solutions to migrate them to cloud. For example, SQL Enterprises uses the Always On, where you introduce a new machine into the clustering. Then you try to put that as a secondary, and then you migrate.

Otherwise, if you have SQL Standard, then you can use a log sheet mechanism, which can be used to migrate the data. For SAP HANA, you can use HSR, HANA Service Replication, and for Oracle you can use the Data Guard, the negative solutions supported, but definitely Azure is doing that, as well. When we talk about a typical DR scenario, the cost that you are giving within Microsoft Azure would be storage, then the Azure Site Recovery cost, and then the network readiness. Microsoft Azure is an optimized solution when we compare it to any other particular cloud solution.

In terms of what could be improved with Azure, I would like to see something like what Google has created with their cross-platform solution, Anthos. I would like to see some features like Anthos has. Secondly, there are multiple DevOps solutions and tools available in Microsoft Azure, but most of the time they are either in the build mode, meaning you don't get complete support for them because they are either making changes, or changing the names of the particular services. Sometimes, services vanish from the portal. We are not able to see that. I think they actually change the names of the services.

For example, they had advanced data analytics in Office 365. They actually removed it and they now include all those features in Windows Defender. 

One more thing that I would like to say is that AWS works on availability zones. You have multiple availability zones in a particular region, which means that in that particular region you have more than one data center. If any of their single data centers fail, they can do a failover to the next immediate data center, which is in the same region. But in the case of Azure, if the data center fails for one particular region, they need to do a failover to different region altogether, which is separated by a geographical distance. That will be a kind of DR scenario.

Microsoft should focus on the higher availability of data centers where they can have more than one data center in a single region. I think they have implemented that kind of solution in the USA. They are going to do it soon in Europe and other countries as well, but it still is an upcoming feature. It's not completely built. They need to build that. 

The second thing which I feel regarding Microsoft Azure in India, is that they have less case studies when we talk about SAP on Azure as compared to SAP on AWS. There are fewer numbers of case studies on the portal. You can't find any. Whereas when you go into the India section for AWS, you will find plenty in terms of SAP and cloud.

Case studies are not there. If you have case studies, good case studies of large banks or any kind of government sectors, those case studies would definitely help to build customer trust on that particular platform.

There is one more thing which I would like to talk about in terms of costing. When you talk about AWS, they have three different types of costing models - partial upfront, no upfront, and all upfront. Azure has two models, all up front and no upfront. But also in these costing models, AWS has multiple other payment modes in terms of one-year or three-year. Azure does not have that. It lacks that particular costing mechanism, which it needs so there are more costing models. There is a lack of pricing flexibility, and I would like to see more costing models and licensing.

The third thing I would like to say, is that Azure was pretty bad in terms of the recent service off-time for Microsoft Azure and AWS. They didn't complete 99.99% of service they provide to the customers as compared to AWS. AWS data centers have also gone out recently, I think, four or five service interruptions, but definitely Azure should be keeping that in mind. I think with the help of clustering data centers in a single region, they can achieve that.

I do not want to take any credit away from Azure or AWS, but definitely Anthos is a big plus point for DCP. Azure should also build that kind of platform. Secondly, they can work on creating more data centers to build the regional availability,  which AWS already has across geography. The third thing they can work on is their costing models and the RI models - make them a bit more flexible for the client.

I have been working on Azure for the past seven years.

Regarding stability, Azure is doing well in terms of IES portfolio. They need to progress on the implementation of more data centers in a single region, which would increase their service level agreement by a little. They definitely need to work on their DevOps services. AWS' DevOps services are pretty good. If you go into ratings, the leading raters or the leading magazines, Forrester or Gartner or IDC, rate AWS services much higher compared to Azure. So, they need to increase on their service.

The third thing on the stability factor is that they publish more cases on the core infrastructure migration, the mission critical applications like SAP migration or Apple migrations. Putting the case studies on the portal would alleviate the doubt that Azure is stable. Azure is stable, but the case studies have to be there to support that.

When we talk about scale and scale out mechanisms, this works pretty seamlessly in Azure. For example, if I need to use the spot instances that AWS has (spot instances are those instances which are actually created at times when you need a high memory or a high CPU for some time) you can configure a spot instance and the spot instance occurs, and it does the load checkpoint. Azure does the same thing with scaling out. However, one thing regarding RI is that AWS does not support that, but when I am in a particular RI, for example my family is the DS series, I am in DS3 or DS4, if I want to scale up, I can scale up with the same RI, but if I need to scale down, I cannot scale down unless I remove that RI and create a new one. I cannot scale into a different family altogether.

Cross-family scaling is not there. Cross-family scaling would help because sometimes being on cloud machines which are in RI, those machines have been used for one year and are currently a very small application host or they are hosting applications or IA services, etc... Now, that particular application has been, or is getting decommissioned, and the company wants to leave the same RI machines for a different application altogether for which they want that particular application to perform on a higher computer issue. For that particular thing I need to cancel that RI and with the remaining my budget, and with the call deduction that Microsoft does, I need to purchase a new RI. If the cross-family RI is there, then it is definitely smoother, and the priority won't be there. So, it will not be an economic blow for the company.

When you open a normal case, Azure has a response matrix. They don't have a resolution matrix - at what particular time that will be resolved. The maximum resolution matrix is not there. But when we talk about the premium support, then Azure has a response matrix and a resolution matrix, and they also have the escalation matrix.

When I was working in Progressive Infotech, we had the advanced support subscription with Microsoft Azure Support. We were given multiple hours of advanced support. We were also provided with other things. I felt then that when you're opening a support ticket, and the support ticket priority is less or if the ticket that you opened is not in the premium bracket, the resolution will be late and the support matrix won't follow the time. They have a response. I think the response matrix is there for basic support and for advanced support. Premium support has the resolution matrix, as well. But the support center needs to have a service level agreement, which has the response matrix, the resolution matrix, and escalation matrix. That will build more trust from the partners in the OEM. AWS actually does not have that, but their response and resolution are pretty good because all the cases that you open in AWS are paid.

Azure materials are pretty good compared to AWS, or any other platform materials. Azure has multiple platforms, and MS Learn is where you can learn about the platforms and the services. Then you have Docs.Microsoft.com, which you can use as a troubleshoot document or understanding of how to implement that solution. With the help of Microsoft Azure, the Microsoft platform, you have multiple types of cases which you can open in the Microsoft Portal. The premium cases are there. Then you have support cases, as well. Azure is pretty good there. Their support matrix is pretty good. The materials are there, the support matrix is there. So, that is pretty good.

Microsoft Azure has multiple levels that an organization can take. Once they had the silver, bronze and the gold partnerships, and in terms of the productivity there is the Office 365 suite or the Azure suite, and they have specialty certifications, as well. You have the premium certifications. If you are also providing support to the client, then as a manager you can join Microsoft as an expert MSP. I think there are 50 or 55 in the country. It started at 15, and it grew to 55. Because many companies who are putting out tenders or an RFP or RFQ, mention in the PQ criteria that the partner should be MSP certified.

It would definitely help. It would act as a USP for you because there are multiple companies in India, more than hundreds and hundreds of companies in India and outside India. The customer would know the first company which is an expert MSP and the Microsoft partners would also give the lead to those export MSPs. Currently, you can also elevate the level by being on a fast track team, which is a one-stop team for Microsoft implementation and support for the Office 365 platform. The fast track team can be a very good asset because you can get a faster certification and then you сan be on the fast track board. You can actually make money when you do a successful implementation or support for a particular client. So the value is there.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Microsoft Azure an eight.

We deploy all of our projects in Microsoft Azure. We are a startup company. We have been since the beginning deploying our code in Azure cloud. We are actively using the full capabilities of two cloud services.

The application services are the most valuable in Microsoft Azure. I'm not using them directly but I am using the function and the web applications. I don't need to pay a lot for the maintenance. I do not need to have a DevOps employee. 

I am familiar with Google, and everything I was doing was in Google. I had to control my back proxies and do my own configuration files. With Microsoft Azure, it is all easy.

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

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately four years.

The solution is stable. 

It's easy to monitor, there's no problem with the code in their development. We had some stability issues, it was not the fault of Microsoft Azure, but it was the mistakes of the developers. It was easy to monitor it in Azure.

Microsoft Azure is highly scalable.

On only one web application I created with one service plan I can connect 10  projects. Imagine one machine can run 10 projects at the same time because whatever the project has more requests or demands, it will scale its machines and auto-scale down. This is why it makes it affordable. I can control which project is demanding more computing power or storage power.

We have approximately 50 people using this solution in my organization. It is mainly back and front developers.

We are drastically increasing our usage because last year we were running 13 projects, and now 19 projects. In 2022 we are trying to double our team.

The support could improve. For example, Python is needed for Microsoft Azure,  and the lack of documentation for the community is a problem. If you are a Python developer Microsoft Azure released an update to Python at the end of May 2021. Theoretically, I can use it with Python, but if I have a problem I need to call a Microsoft engineer to solve it. It takes some time. However, I did receive very good support from the Microsoft engineers to make my system production-ready, but language support for Python and other languages is coming late.

I have used other solutions, such as Google and AWS.

When comparing these solutions to Microsoft Azure, AWS has better documentation, Google's cognitive services, and predictions give better results, and Microsoft Azure has the best UI. If you want to reach the database of Google, there is no such SQL manager UI. Microsoft Azure UI is easy to use and has great tools.

The deployment's easy and the pipelines are easy from the Azure DevOps, everything is integrated and it has good security. The overall setup is extremely easy.

We have a team in London that is maintaining the solution. We have 450 backend developers at this site and approximately five people are looking after all the maintenance and admin roles. We have database and developers administrators that are giving access to the people for the production maintenance. 

I am very happy with the solution.

Thanks to the training I have received from Microsoft Azure, which cost £60,000, I'm up-skilling all my team for the certification, databases, and machine learning tool. Every month I'm receiving approximately £1,000 from the training credit for the up-skilling.

It is simple to start with Microsoft Azure if you know the application life cycle. You can try so many things without any cost because of the serverless system. You will not be charged for any request at the beginning. For example, you are creating a function application in Azure the first 10,000 requests are free. It is great because you can anyone a developer to test anything.

They're not using very heavy machine learning systems, the system is generally cheap. For example, they are giving a free month trial and a developer can't finish it personally if they do not use a large computing machine.

At the moment they are adding new features faster than I expected. For example, they have Python support but five years ago there wasn't any Python support. They were slow at the beginning but now it updates very quickly. For example, the community services for the low code, no code power platforms, and the power platforms.

I spoke to my developers, machine learning engineer, data engineer, and data scientists and told them please use the auto ML or the community services better. As a London business user site team, we can create all the virtual agents and AI builders with the no code platform for the machine learning models for the power applications. The auto ML is very powerful and you don't need to be an expert in machine learning.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

We have our data lake on it. In terms of deployment, I believe we have a hybrid deployment.

We can temporarily build out an environment for different scenarios, such as testing, and when testing is done, we can shut that environment down. So, we do not have an overhead in our own data center.

The ability to scale down is a big thing.

It can be improved in terms of ease of billing or monitoring of the billing. That gets to be a little difficult.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is absolutely stable. Microsoft doesn't want to sell something that isn't.

Its scalability is excellent. You just turn something on, and it is there. We have not made any reservations on it. We can scale up and scale down as needed. There is nothing that we have that is a commitment.

We probably have about 500 users, and they are administrators, developers, BI folks who actually manipulate it and create reports, and then we have end-users for the data. They are the people that use those reports.

In terms of the plans to increase its usage, right now, we're going through a merger, which will impact the data a little bit. So, we are in a holding pattern in terms of scaling up anything until that merger gets completed.

We go through a third party for that, and their support is really good.

We were fully on-premise with some SaaS platforms, and we then moved to Azure for a part of that.

It was complex, and that was mostly because of the security needs. We had to understand how things fit together.

The original deployment, just for testing, took about half a day, but to really get it going and to be able to allow access to people, other than the administrators, took more time. We're a financial institution, so we had to have everything monitored and secure. It probably took about four months to get it functional on the production side.

We used a consultant. They were excellent. They knew exactly what they were talking about. They were able to give us not only what was needed presently for our deployment but also the things to think about as we let the environment grow in the future.

For its deployment and maintenance, I've got security folks who watch what's going on. They make sure that only the right people are getting the right data, and it is not being allowed to folks who shouldn't have access. I have nothing public-facing on it. I've got administrators. I've probably got three people in security and five people in the administration. We're a 24/7 business, so it is split across all of that time.

Originally, when we implemented it, it was basically in a like-for-like way, which is not the way the platform is designed. So, once we were able to really get in there and figure things out, we figured out that we could use a much smaller footprint. That helped us out quite a bit in terms of a return on investment. We are seeing probably about 75% of the regular data center cost in Azure, so there were 25% savings, but we could see that go down as testing was being eliminated over different platforms.

Currently, we do not have anything reserved. There are no reservations that we have built into the Azure environment, so all of our licensing is on a consumption basis. As things spin up, those licenses spin up.

In terms of the additional costs incurred beyond the standard licensing fee, such as for operations, it's kind of tough for me to judge because I already had a fully-staffed operations team in a fully on-premise platform environment. So, we didn't spin up anybody extra for that. It just changed what they were doing.

We evaluated other options. We decided to go with Azure because we understood the licensing and VMs and how all of that worked together. Prior to the merger, we were looking at bringing the platform onto AWS. It wasn't that we were necessarily exclusive; we just felt that this was our best first step.

I would advise understanding what data you're going to be putting out there, and what your security requirements are for that. You should be ready to have a workshop so that everyone involved knows what's going on. Get a good understanding from the accounts payable team about how the payments are coming in and how to monitor them.

I love the product. From a procurement standpoint, I don't have a lot of control over it. Unless we've got some contracting of what we plan on doing, I don't have a lot of control over licenses, etc. An administrator can just go out, do it, and put the licensing in place, and then it is like you've got to pay for it. It doesn't function well in a P2P type of environment.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

I work for a Naval Shipyard. We build fighter ships for fighter aircraft. The Navy is our sponsor. Everything that we do is Navy or Navy-related. A lot of what we do is classified; however, I can say that we do some robotic AI work. 

Microsoft is our corporate authentication piece, so everything has to authenticate to Microsoft Azure. Everything in the whole entire company has to authenticate there. Even if you're building something, you have to be leading up to the point where it's going to authenticate to Microsoft. They are the vendor of choice, as far as authentication, but they're not the vendor of choice as far as all things at the shipyard. 

Our entire organization uses this solution. Size-wise, we're similar to a small city.

No features really stand out in particular. The reason that we use Microsoft Azure is that Microsoft has left us no choice — that's what I would say. If you use Microsoft, you've been curtailed in your on-prem data center. There are certain things we can do with Azure on-prem that we can't do on the cloud. We're now fully in the cloud. But even most of the Office products, which are in Office 365, are still on-prem. I came to this company to do cloud, but the company isn't ready to go to the cloud. It sounds like upper management is going to be changing some of the business structures. The better information I can give upper management, as far as our features and capabilities, will help them to make better business decisions. That's kind of where I am currently.

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.

I have been working with Microsoft since the very beginning.

Although I am not the administrator, there are some things that are kind of quirky. The biggest problem is that we're a really, really, really big SharePoint user. Everything that's 100% SharePoint online, is not a one-for-one into the SharePoint that we have on-prem. 

Security is a problem, that's why we only allow web products for Office 365. SharePoint doesn't give us everything that we need. These are a few of the drawbacks for us.

Scalability is complex, but only because our company is complex.

Support depends. For the professional services, they're usually pretty good.

For other divisions, the support hasn't been that good. Anytime we have problems and we try to ask for support, what we paid for is one thing and what we're getting is another thing. Because of this, we often have to renegotiations with Microsoft. 

The initial setup is very complex because we're a complex corporation.

The review board has actually approved all of the Microsoft Office 2016 products and applications. We have the licenses, however, we're not using them.

Teams is the one collaborative product that everybody wants to use. We've approved Microsoft Teams on the web only. Because of our security constraint, we don't want our users to use every feature that's actually on Teams. We don't want to allow third-party vendors to use that application in order to get into our environment. 

For example, you can share your screen, but I can't share my screen. I can share an application if it's been approved, but I can't share my screen. The only way I can actually talk to you is if we talk about topical issues that you would read about in the newspaper or something like that. I can't tell you anything that's company proprietary.

Right now we're looking at Microsoft TFS, Azure on DevOps. However, all of the features have to be configured by someone. It's not that ADO can't do it, it's just that it would take a lot of time — we'd have to have someone physically come in and do it. That would require Microsoft Professional Services which costs a lot of money. Often, people can just buy stuff off the shelf when they want to use another product. For example, all the ALM tools actually integrate with TFS. So, if we have a product that already has that capability, why are we purchasing those new products? Why are we doing a POC for that? So that's what kind of hat I wear here.

If you're interested in going with Microsoft, my advice would be to do it. Everybody's using Microsoft.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

The problem is that I'm an old Microsoft engineer. I like to build it the way I want to build it.  I don't want it to be SaaS. I liked the fact that you could build your servers in the AWS environment and build out the servers the way you want. They're actually taking away a lot of the applications. More and more companies are switching to SaaS or IAS, etc.

Now, the structure is going towards SaaS. I think I have a three-year lifecycle on my licenses and then I will have to drop or either migrate my data to SaaS. It's probably cheaper for people to go that way, but it gives you less flexibility. There's probably more security, but you're depending on the vendor's security or however they have that set up. You lose a lot of your flexibility when you go into SaaS.

We have deployed the NMS network monitoring system in Azure. We can monitor the network through it. There is no need to deploy an NOC (Network Operations Center) in my country. If we use Audiovi and Airspace there and install the NMS network element and Microsoft, everything is configured in Azure. Configuration is done remotely from anywhere. By entering Azure, we monitor the NMS network.

The stability could be improved.

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

The solution’s scalability is good. 

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

The initial setup is straightforward and user-friendly. 

Azure offers a trial version, which you can use for free before proceeding to payment.

We are using the free version.

I recommend the solution to use it. This solution is cost-effective, with high uptime and zero downtime.

We use the solution to set up access to process queuing, configure virtual instances, obtain a domain name, acquire the necessary certificates, and deploy the web server to the internet.

Microsoft Azure has proven to be beneficial for our organization due to its quick deployment capabilities. Setting up virtual machines or any required infrastructure is fast. 

The tool needs to improve its navigation. 

I have been using the product for two to three years. 

Microsoft Azure's stability depends on the resources allocated. If you provision sufficient resources, it tends to be stable. However, choosing lower resources, like two gigs of RAM and CPUs, might lead to less stability.

The product is scalable. My company has five users. 

I haven't contacted the technical team yet. 

Microsoft Azure's deployment is straightforward for me, given my experience and understanding of the Azure system. It is not difficult for me to handle.

The tool's deployment was done in-house. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

We had a cloud migration project from on-premise to the cloud. We used various components like Azure’s cost calculator to provide the ongoing running costs.

SQL Server has been most beneficial for our client’s workload.

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

I have been using the solution for five years.

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

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten. Our clients are medium to large businesses.

I rate the ease of setup a five out of ten. The product is deployed on the cloud. The deployment took a few hours.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. All cloud services are expensive.

I rate the solution’s ability to support our client’s business growth a seven out of ten. We don't get direct support from Microsoft. I rate Azure's integration capabilities a seven out of ten. I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.