IBM Cloud Object Storage vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Object Storage
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Object Storage is an IBM Cloud product in the endpoint backup and IaaS categories. It is commonly used for data archiving and backup, for web and mobile applications, and as scalable, persistent storage for analytics.
$0
per month
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
One-Rate Plan
As low as USD $10/TB a month
per month
Standard Plan
Free up to 5GB—no minimum fee, pay only for what you use
per month
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe One-Rate and Standard service plans for Cloud Object Storage include resiliency options, flexible data classes and built-in security. Pricing is based on the choice of location, storage class and resiliency choice.The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloud Object Storage
Chose IBM Cloud Object Storage
at this moment, IBM Cloud Object Storage is the best cost-performance service
Microsoft Azure

No answer on this topic

Features
IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Object Storage
8.7
155 Ratings
6% above category average
Microsoft Azure
8.4
28 Ratings
2% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime6.1143 Ratings8.227 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.8143 Ratings8.626 Ratings
Elastic load balancing8.9140 Ratings8.725 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.8144 Ratings8.327 Ratings
Security controls9.8149 Ratings8.627 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings8.226 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.425 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings8.927 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.225 Ratings
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IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
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Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(158 ratings)
8.7
(97 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(17 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(5 ratings)
8.4
(37 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(8 ratings)
8.0
(28 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.8
(4 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud Object StorageMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
In my experience, IBM Cloud Object Storage is well suited for projects like the one I am working on. This includes the use of natural language classification and the uploading of data to train a machine learning model for tag suggestions based on a body of text. Using IBM Cloud Object Storage has helped with this greatly. IBM Cloud Object Storage has also been great for Big Data Analytics thanks to its scalablilty and ease of use for large datasets. Alongside IBM Watson and our team's internal big data tools we've managed to process and analyze data more efficiently, leading to key insights that have driven business value for our clients.
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Microsoft
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.
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Pros
IBM
  • IBM Cloud Object Storage is an excellent choice for disaster recovery and backup solutions. Its high durability and geographic redundancy ensure that our backup data is safe and can be quickly restored in case of a disaster. This capability is crucial for maintaining our business continuity and minimizing downtime. We have deployed our loads in an IKS cluster distributed in 3 different AZs with stateful data allocated in COS.
  • We have a video streaming application and need to store and deliver a vast library of video content to millions of users worldwide, so we store our data in COS, which is cheap and reliable.
  • We have a bunch of data that must be analyzed and stored in datasets for fraud detection, risk management, and customer insights. In these cases, this data is moved from Onprem to IBM Cloud so we can use cheap storage like COS.
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Microsoft
  • 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.
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Cons
IBM
  • Searching and retrieving—full-text search or metadata search—is one of the significant areas of improvement. It isn't easy to search for data with this.
  • Integration with other IBM cloud services is trickier. For example, integrating this with API Connect to access the data from API will be difficult for users.
  • Support - I think you should have more support community.
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Microsoft
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
because it is a robust, safe and flexible product
Read full review
Microsoft
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.
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Usability
IBM
For my use cases, it has been a very smooth experience. Even my new colleagues have been able to get on top of things very quickly. This shows how easy it is to work with
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Microsoft
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.
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
We rarely face downtime or access issues with IBM Cloud Object Storage. It’s mostly available when we need it, even during peak hours or heavy data loads.
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Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Performance
IBM
I would give it a 9 because it works smooth with our AI and analytics tools, no major slowdown. Pages and dashboards load fine most of the time, and reports finish in decent time even when data is heavy.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM
I have been working in IT sector for more than 15 years. I have worked with various vendors. IBM's sales team, support team have been really helpful. After we start to use their product, their UX design team also contacted us to get feedback from us. They are really interested about our experience.
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Microsoft
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!
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Online Training
IBM
I just researching and applying the tools on their platforms to ensure a good learning path, based on my needs. Reading the documentation related with resources, tools. Is too big, but I am trying to know more about it every day. It is a good way to know more about their resources. A new way to attract new customers. At the end of the day, we are all involved in improvement and automation of our tasks and resources for customers and end-users.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
IBM
Yes Our organization used IBM professional services to implement IBM object storage because of its data consistency and multiple way to upload and download data and its encryption security features. Also that its brand matter for the any organization to secure the layer and storage. It sis also verify that application and system are compatibale for this product
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Microsoft
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.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely back up your data where redundancy is guaranteed, and the cost is fair. In the past I have used Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access, but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command, we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Amazon S3 service is a good option, but based on the features it provides compared with IBM Cloud Object Storage, it is less suitable. IBM Cloud Object Storage is also integrated with more services, like IBM Cloud SQL and IBM Aspera, which AWS does not provide to transfer files at maximum speed in the world.
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Microsoft
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.
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Scalability
IBM
Scaling up the number of users can lead to significant increases in licensing costs, which, while not a technical limitation, can be a practical constraint for some organizations
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • This allows us to recommend a platform to our clients that will quickly help them create new, efficient business processes with very little development.
  • This saves clients hours and days of manual analysis of images, allowing the system to do the work when attaching Object Storage to models.
  • There is a learning curve in utilizing the storage and the modeling, but once up and running, it works well during deployment.
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Microsoft
  • 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.
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ScreenShots

IBM Cloud Object Storage Screenshots

Screenshot of Cloud Object Storage set upScreenshot of storage bucket creationScreenshot of the Access Management interfaceScreenshot of the interface to create, add and management of Storage BucketsScreenshot of data uploadingScreenshot of usage details