Likelihood to Recommend In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.
Read full review The tool is excellent when you need to provide all the details about your clients, yet hide their identity - all while maintaining the referential integrity of the data (so child-records of the masked parent record and maintain the same fake ID of the parent).
Read full review Pros Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well. Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional. BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space. Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose. Read full review It offers several ways in which you can mask your data; for example, you can choose to replace all names with "real fake names", or choose to replace all SSNs with existing SSNs, but randomly assigned. You control the algorithm. It works on non-Oracle databases as well (in our case, we use it for both Oracle and SQL/Server). The overhead is minimal (it doesn't take long to run, and it doesn't consume too many system resources. Read full review Cons In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs. Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure. Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs. Read full review The learning curve was not trivial - but we got through it. Cost - this product is not cheap. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
Read full review Reliability and Availability It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
Read full review Support Rating Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We also looked at Delphix: the tool was quite powerful, easy to use, and competitive from a cost standpoint. However, since our entire data warehouse environment is built on the Oracle technology stack, it made sense to us to use the Oracle product here, as it integrates very well with other Oracle database and ETL products.
Read full review Return on Investment Brings down Capex to customers. Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers. Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure. Read full review We have many compliance regulations we need to adhere to. Without this tool, we were always taking a risk of exposing client information, and get penalized by the State of the Feds (the financial consequences are significant). So while the tool doesn't save us money directly, it greatly reduces the risk we had been taking all these years. To some degree, this is much like an insurance policy. Given the above, it also allows us to share information with other departments/agencies, in situations where before we simply couldn't take the risk of exposing client information. Read full review ScreenShots