Cloudflare One (SASE) vs. Microsoft Azure

I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.

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.

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

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

• Cloudflare still need to improve CASB direction to complete set of SASE tools.
• More integrations with the third-party agents to check device posture in the Zero Trust framework.
• More granularity in firewall rules for full replacement of on-premise solutions.

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• The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.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.

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.

Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.

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

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

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.

Cloudflare was both the most feature-rich and cost-effective of comparisons. Presales engagement understood our challenges and was keen to solve them.

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

• The cost of Cloudflare Zero trust is much lower, hence reducing spending on infrastructure security.
• The Network performance is improved thanks to Warp protocol.
• Requires less maintenance and hence saves time.

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