Amazon CloudFront vs Azure Active Directory

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon CloudFront is best suited when there is a need of speed in serving static and dynanic web contents of a web application. If the content is already in that edge location, CloudFront delivers it immediately. If the content is not currently in that edge location, CloudFront retrieves it from an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server. Amazon CloudFront is not appropriate in case users can tolerate some delays or servers are present near to the location of user. It also Integrates through the W3 Total Cache plugin. Amazon CloudFront Pricing based on bandwidth usage that's the best part of it.

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Ashish Agarwal

Software Engineer

GenpactInformation Technology and Services, 1001-5000 employees

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If you are opening a shop and you need software to get the ball rolling compared to Google. Microsoft is the go-to vendor in my opinion. You can get your active directory services, mail, and collaboration tools like teams and offices from one vendor. Anyone with minimal knowledge of IT can actually configure all of these services to get you up to speed. The product is very versatile so in the future if you would like to have cloud servers and services this product have you covered. As your organization grows you can easily integrate the best MFA solutions with Azure AD to keep your organization safe. This is not the product that you should invest in if your organization does not have that many windows devices. For instance, if your company owns Macs other than products like MS Office, Share Point, etc you don't need to get Azure active directory.

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Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology

Computer & Network Security Company, 11-50 employees

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Pros

CloudFront, like other CDNs, is a very reliable content delivery network for delivering content like images, videos, HTML, and javascripts that are run on browsers across the world.
It provides secure hosting of content at no extra cost. AWS Certification Manager also provides the ability to create and manage custom SSL certificates at no extra cost for our websites.
It is secure, which means that it uses AWS Shield for Layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation and AWS WAF for Layer 7 protection. Hence seamlessly integrating with other AWS services. So you do not have to shop outside of AWS ecosystem

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Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 10,001+ employees

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Conditional Access -- this is one of the biggest tools that any admin needs when it comes to securing when, where, and how users are accessing information. Especially if the information contains sensitive data types.
Multi-factor Authentication -- we have all our employees configured for MFA. This is incredibly easy to configure with Azure, as well as defining when MFA should be used through Conditional Access.
Audit Logs -- being able to track and identify a user's activity is pretty critical, especially when in incident response mode.

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Caleb Reinhardt

CIO (Chief Information Officer)

Calloway Co School DistrictPrimary/Secondary Education, 201-500 employees

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Cons

If price is the main concern, CloudFront is not the cheapest-in-class by a wide margin
Some of the settings are not obvious to new users, and the management dashboards could use work
Lacks fine-grained access controls and statistical reports for usage

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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The UI can be cumbersome to use - bulk edits for instance are best handled using powershell.
Documentation can be hard to find when integrating AD into web apps
Some settings in AD can be confusing with no obvious explanation - for instance, setting up custom scopes for an application is confusing.

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Gordon Lo

Digital Solutions Architect

DynacareHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0.02

Amazon CloudFront Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10TB	$0.09
Next 40TB	$0.08
Next 100TB	$0.06
Next 350TB	$0.04
Next 524TB	$0.03
Next 4PB	$0.03
Over 5PB	$0.02

none

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$6 per user/per month

Azure Active Directory Editions & Modules

Edition

Premium P1	$6.00¹
Premium P2	$9.00¹

per user/per month

Additional Pricing Details

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Usability

Amazon CloudFront 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.

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Carlos Becerra

Senior Software Engineer & Project Manager

WiFiesta IncInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Amazon CloudFront 7.1

Based on 7 answers

CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

E-Learning Company, 51-200 employees

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Azure Active Directory 7.7

Based on 29 answers

Microsoft has offered Azure Active Directory as a solution for a couple of decades now, so they have seen and anticipated almost any issue that an organization may face and can therefore help. The cloud offering of Azure Active Directory offers some additional "self healing" or monitoring services that can minimize the need for a service call. However, as with most large companies supporting a fast growing market, there may be some gaps in service knowledge (and particularly processing) from the front line / tier one staff as they follow a corporate script at first contact.

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Matt Varney

Intranet Administrator

KCTCSHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon has always been creative and leading, and I have been using its services for years. They are very reassuring and have fast and responsive support--you can call them from any time zone to respond quickly. High security on servers, open hands on changes, and increasing and decreasing server resources and features.

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Ali Kazempour

Information Technology Manager

AzerexInformation Technology & Services, 1-10 employees

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In our particular scenario, we chose [Microsoft] Azure Active Directory because it has integration with tools and applications we use on a day to day basis, such as inTune, Autopilot, Office 365, Exchange Online, Dynamics 365, just to named a few.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Government Relations Company, 201-500 employees

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Return on Investment

Our website loads much more quickly in other countries as a result of CloudFront. For example: loading cached assets from CloudFront in Australia is 4x as fast as it would be to load the same assets without CloudFront.
Very inexpensive service considering the value it brings.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Entertainment Company, 1-10 employees

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It has helped us evaluate our future in the cloud as we plan to migrate
It allows us to scale down our on-premise infrastructure resulting in cost-savings
It has put a bigger workload on some, adding to statement of work, in terms of evaluation

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Aviation & Aerospace Company, 10,001+ employees

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