CenturyLink Public Cloud (discontinued) vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Navisite Managed Infrastructure Services (NaviCloud)

I believe for small to mid business application hosting Centurylink provides an adequate service. When moving to larger scale business enviornments I believe the limitations, slowness is going to become a problem

Incentivized

Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.

Clarify before hand any additional charges for remote hand and arrangement/SLA for remote hand. Negotiate well on these terms as they tend to be more flexible around this. Clarify shipping and handling charges if any.

Incentivized

• Offloading the requirements for hosting apps in house - cost savings
• Access ability - users could access documents and programs from anywhere
• Collaborative work ability - multiple users could work within the same enviornment

Incentivized

• Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
• You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
• The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
• The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.

Incentivized

• 24/7 monitoring
• Immediate notification in the event of failures
• Dedicated Senior DBA
• Dedicate Account rep

Incentivized

• Perhaps ease of use - it's not convoluted but a little more streamlined of an interface would be great
• Make your presence more known - in a world of heavily advertised cloud options CenturyLink is not at the top of the pile and I think it may be due to a lack of awareness in the business community. Advertise!
• Streamline functionality - interface can be a little slow at times.

Incentivized

• The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
• The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
• Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.

• San Jose facility power outage caused damage to company's credibility, this should not occur again being 7x24 facility and backup generator
• Avoiding too many management changes will help create good connection with individuals for sustained harmony

Incentivized

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

Price and facility equipment, location of the hosting facility factor into the decision to renew

Incentivized

As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

I did not select the application hosting environment - I was a user. That being said I do not have much of a voice in the difference between hosted services that I have experienced.

Incentivized

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

Incentivized

Navisite's rates were better and they seemed to have more SQL Server expertise. This was about 5 years ago and it may not be the case anymore

Incentivized

• For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
• DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
• Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.

Incentivized

• Cost savings by not having a full-time DBA on staff - saving of at least 50K a year
• Data team not on call 24/7
• Navisite team will try to fix issue if possible - e.g. shrink log files that have grown

Incentivized