Microsoft Azure vs. SecureLink Enterprise Access

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.

It does exactly what it needs to. The only times I've had serious issues with rolling out to a vendor is when they have a "contractual agreement" to only use their solution. Almost every vendor that I've worked with and shown this product to has been skeptical for the first 5 minutes and fully converted to liking the ease of use of the product by 10 minutes

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to setup on a client PC or server for access
• Organizes client connections by gatekeeper so it is easy to find what you need
• File transfer option is great for uploading files to client servers

• 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.

Incentivized

• Java based. Always an issue. I know they are working on this and it will be Javaless if we need it. I know that Java can cause issues across the board and I understand the need of it, but it does not make it any better when there are Java issues.
• Stronger integration with the Active Directory. Currently its only read-only, which is good and bad.
• I would love to see an App. I know they are working on this as well.

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.

We are happy using securelink to access our client environments

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"

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The employees at Securelink have always been responsive and seem to be invested in the success of my company. They truly understand what their product means to us so if there is a problem, they are always willing to help. In the rare event that something is found on their end, they will be proactive and reach out to someone to help and get something on calendar for a fix

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.

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

Securelink seems to work better than LogMein for a large enterprise group. Our company has over 10,000 different connections and securelink manages them well.

• 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.

Incentivized

• I've found that Securelink allows me to get a vendor access to an application for support purposes much faster than a provisioned VPN account and the red tape around this. I can set up a vendor to access an application suite in a half hour and it will be more secure than regular provisioning.
• The ROI is yet to be seen on this, but it certainly makes Compliance, Internal Audit, and Legal very happy, which helps everybody.
• Internally, there is much more push back and it has been problematic. For a tech, to have to log in to a server and navigate to a system is considered cumbersome, when before all they had to do was open up Putty or RDP to a server to get in. The only way to combat this is to force them to use Securelink by removing rights. Near impossible for the domain admins.