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 For scenarios where the implementation is an Oracle ecosystem and the need for high-performance storage is present, undoubtedly the ideal solution is Oracle ZFS due to the native integration that exists, for example, with SPARC equipment, Exadata, and traditional architecture running Oracle Linux or Solariums (depending on the case), as well as in highly demanding industries in terms of storage.
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 Software RAIDZ. Create storage arrays using best available RAID technologies for excellent disk stability Array images and backups. Allows administrators to instantly create disk snapshots, to minimize time disk is unavailable (on the order of seconds, not minutes or hours). Automatic de-deduplication/compression. ZFS will automatically de-dedup data on disk, allowing for more efficient use of the entire disk for unique data. It will also automatically compress data stored on the disk, allowing for even more usage of the available disk space. Great for infrequently accessed backups (There is some performance cost to compression). 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 Because it was due to a software originally designed for Solaris. configuration in other environments can be cumbersome for inexperienced implementers. The proprietary particularity of this File System makes it in some cases very difficult to implement in highly heterogeneous environments. I think that additional forms of integration with more environments should be created. 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 ZFS is so far beyond the other filesystems available right now, offering full suites of tools for data management, backup, recovery, maintenance, monitoring, etc. It's not even fair to compare them.
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 In highly transactional and data-intensive environments such as 200 million records per month or more. Banking also represents an ideal niche for this type of implementation due to its high volume of data and the need for security in this industry with over 100 million records per day and online history maintenance for more than 10 years (in most cases). The Return on Investment or ROI is clearly seen in the medium term since your storage solution would be in your safekeeping without having to pay anything additional to regular maintenance. Read full review ScreenShots