Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.
Azure Backup is suitable for companies of various sizes, with varying amounts of data. The cost of the investment should be thought out carefully so that there are no bad surprises with unnecessary files going to Azure Backup. The interface is friendly and easy to configure and it does not require your company to have a backup expert. It is highly recommended for companies with smaller number of servers and better if the servers are already running in an Azure environment.
Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.
Azure Backup is fast! Coupled with the fact that Microsoft created Azure and Windows - these two operate phenomenally together!
Administering the backups inside of Azure is a breeze. The ability to mount, restore entire backups, or recover files, has been made very easy. You do not have to download any media to recover something, you do this all in the cloud and it gets mounted in Microsoft's systems. Making this process less than a quarter of the time you would have spent with your 'other' backup solutions.
Backup vaults should ask if you want to send notifications when you first set it up, there have been a couple of times when I noticed a month later that, backup job failures were not configured to send email notifications.
One of the differentials of the solution is the high level of guarantee and support of the Azure Backup solution. Microsoft is a reference in a technology company with a highly trained support team and helps us with any questions or technical problems with the tool. Service is fast and efficient with trained engineers.
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.
Azure Backup works on Azure, the most famous of the cloud systems that the whole world has switched to, which is now a very large part of the Microsoft ecosystem that we have been used to using for years. Therefore, it is less tiring to use the additional service of an infrastructure that we already use, even if it is a part of it, which can be easily integrated with existing systems, which is one of the most important issues we IT professionals pay attention to. For this reason, we wanted to swim in familiar waters instead of another brand.
Azure Search enabled us to stand up a robust search capability with very few developer hours.
The fully-managed service of Azure Search means we get low cost of management (EG, DevOps) going into the future, even though the cost of the service itself definitely reflects the time saved.
Azure Search counts as a "Cognitive Service" for Microsoft Azure consumption and aligns our products with Microsoft's interests of driving an AI-first approach in the enterprise. Microsoft Partners, service and product companies alike, should be looking to align with this AI vision as it means favorable treatment from the Microsoft sales teams.