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 It is well suited for situations where you require an end-to-end platform for pushing code and managing data and security of the IoT application. However, it is not well suited for the case when you want to scale the app up to many users and this requires more from the part of the product.
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 Asset Monitoring - quick and easy to deploy, can connect to the plant floor and get real-time data from devices. Analytics - The TWX Analytics extension has a variety of analyses that can be done into any data source input into TWX. Alerts notification - you can program alerts to be sent via email/SMS seamlessly. 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 Advanced functionality in control and data visualization often requires additional coding from the user. Support and tutorials provided are often lacking in detail or are not readily transferable. Mashup development works poorly on small monitors or laptops. 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 We started more than a year ago and do not plan to replace it
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 Experienced and knowledgeable customer support executives, Thingworx is a very large product and contains a myriad of features which is not easy to remember without enough training or hands-on experience
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 Well-suited - multiple streams from many data sources, highly scalable application scenarios.Good for a quick test of internet of things (IoT) connectivity and for deploying access via the web. Smooth deployment, easy to couple to devices. Easy cooperation with Splunk, which we use also.
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 Good for quick deployment of customer specific control of IoT Good for quick test of IoT platform Difficult to debug complicate system Read full review ScreenShots