Microsoft Azure Reviews

Score 8.2 out of 10

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August 14, 2018

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure is one of the best in the market, I would prefer it before AWS (end of story)."

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Azure for our research on Learning Analytics for the University. For now, it is being by only a department but we plan to deploy it in other departments as well. We are mostly using ElasticSearch and Machine Learning service since we need it for our predictive analysis and prescriptive analysis and also trying to use for our apps.

Pros and Cons

It is great for all services like
Iaas, Paas, Saas.
It has an awesome speed of deployment, operation, and scalability which makes the work productive.
Easy data migration makes it easier to integrate into the system and since all of our systems is Windows based it was much easier.
Fully integrated Delivery Pipeline.

Definitely the price. It is expensive when compared to its other competitors
Another improvement that can be done is in the area of Application. Application insight can be made more to easy to migration to the logging from on-premise to cloud.
Since it is huge it has got a number of bugs which sometimes troubles. So more documentation and the bug-free system would be an area of improvement.

Likelihood to Recommend

It helped in the migration of data.
Testing our sites, services, and applications.
Since we are more focused on research and development of our Analytical system its server reliability and ease of deployment makes our life easier.
And also being used in the only department we have a small number of people so anyone able to deploy helps.
Since we are working with excel or you can say Office 365, Azure work with it seamlessly which makes it an ideal solution.

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January 26, 2018

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure is...."

Charlize Lai

System Support

Bank of Communications Trustee LimitedFinancial Services, 201-500 employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For cloud deployment, for continuous integration. Saving TCO of IT infrastructure, reduce business downtime. Having satisfied customers. Azure is a reliable cloud service for whom would like to achieve 0 downtimes. We are going to explore what Azure can do on Machine Learning and AI for the trading platform and predict the business impact.

Pros and Cons

high interoperability
less cost
high performance

should make it more affordable
lack of technical support
function complicate for decision makers

Likelihood to Recommend

For trading platform hosting, for continuous integration.

Read Charlize Lai's full review

February 23, 2018

Microsoft Azure Review: "Awesome Experience with Azure compare to Other Provider"

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Consumer Services Company, 1-10 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Its been used at an organizational level. We used the trial pack to evaluate Azure.

It has addressed many issues. Compared to other cloud service providers, the Azure Management Console is far simpler to monitor. Since we migrated our server to Azure haven't faced any downtime. The second point is that Azure SQL as a Service has helped to optimize the cost and increase performance.

The response time of Azure customer service is amazing; I would usually get a callback from them within three hours.

Pros and Cons

SQL as a Service is very cost effective and easier to manage. There are other vendors who provide SQL as a Service at cost higher than Azure
Compared to AWS and Google, the Azure portal is easier to manage
Its up to you when you want to scale your infrastructure . This is not the case with AWS for which you need to ask permission to access regions. Also if you want to upgrade RAM it takes 2 days to get it done

There is no option to customize RAM which you can do with Google
Customization of processors such as core , GPU etc. is not possible currently, and we have to choose from available options
A few Technical queries should be allowed in the basic subscription

Likelihood to Recommend

It's well suited for startups and other small business vendors.

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June 27, 2017

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure - The future is here"

Rich Mephan

Director of Research and Development

Peppermint Technology LtdComputer Software, 51-200 employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Azure is currently being used by the research & development department for things such as ElasticSearch and Cortana Analytics to add into our applications. Our managed services team is also using Azure for Application Insights - an application monitoring system which tracks usage of our application. Our migration team uses Azure for hardware resources, spinning up multiple server instances to complete migrations.

Pros and Cons

The new portal is easy to use.
The ability to have free trials of the new features such as Cognitive services/Cortana Anaytics is great.
The elasticity of spinning up new hardware and only paying for what you use is really helpful for us.

The templates for spinning up new hardware are not flexible enough.

Likelihood to Recommend

Obviously difficult to answer as Azure has so many features now, some which are suitable for our organisation and some which aren't.

Cognitive Services is great and a real breakthrough in terms of AI and application insights provide us with real-time application monitoring at a fraction of the price of some of the other big players in this space.

Read Rich Mephan's full review

November 22, 2017

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure is good"

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

One of the great benefits of any cloud based computer is the fact that you don't need to maintain your own hardware. No need to think about updates. No need to worry about disaster striking at the hardware level. No need for your own dedicated IT crew. Just sit back and enjoy the computers which are maintained by Microsoft themselves.

Pros and Cons

Webhosting
Test environment
High availability

Making parallel things (such as nic and legacy network) which behave differently.
Enable downtime for VPN portal.
Build your own server.

Likelihood to Recommend

One of our customers needed a solution where several users could simultaneously use the same computer, but did not have anywhere near the budget to buy a proper server. He also needed a good solution for backing up his data off site. Using Azure he managed accomplishing both those needs at once.

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October 04, 2017

"Microsoft Azure Review"

Verified User

General Manager in Information Technology

Pharmaceuticals Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft Azure services for our apps team. We build dev/testing servers; server provisioning is very easy and quick.

Pros and Cons

Few clicks and servers are ready in a few minutes
Cost effective, don't have to manage monitoring as you will get the alert as per your requirements
Never have any performance issues, boosts the performance as per your needs

The on-premise backup and restoration
Disk encryption for critical apps/data
Cost

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited:
Easy and quick provisioning
No need to monitor the services

Not Suited:
Low bandwidth
Without accelerated traffic
Without network appliance

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March 03, 2017

User Review: "Microsoft Azure Flying High In Cloud"

Aditya Sabadra

Application Consultant

CapgeminiComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft Azure in our organization but I work for implementing Azure services and replatforming and Migrating application to Azure at our clients. It solves various problems from easily deploying application to production, reducing overhead of infrastructure cost and its management. It speeds up deployment, operation and scalability. Azure has data centers all across the globe and is one of the leading player in having the most number of data centers around the globe, so it helps users' data to be easily reachable with less cost and overheads. So data is presented to the user from within the region where he resides or requests for. Azure has a fully integrated development environment making it easy for developer to the tools and development services. It has an integrated IOT platform and IOT is the next big thing in IT world. Azure provides Agility and gives developers, Architects, and Consultants an easy to use service required for applications. Azure also helps with DevOps; it has a fully integrated pipeline which gives DevOps Capabilities implementing CI/CD. Azure also helps in disaster recovery. We can also achieve High Availability due to Azure presence all over the globe. Azure is complaint so for example finance companies can rely on Azure to do the heavy lifting of data back and forth from on prim data centers to cloud. Using most of the capabilities of Azure, it is helping us implementing scalable and reliable solution at clients and at different organizations.

Pros and Cons

One of the Main Offerings that Azure provides is PaaS which is quite mature compared to other cloud providers in market.
PaaS support in from developing an application to cloud till deploying it. PaaS support complete life cycle of an application: Building Testing, Deploying, Managing and Updating.
Microsoft operates across the globe and has the highest number of data centers. It operates in 34 regions and are about to open 4 more regions. This is one of the biggest advantages over all the competitors.
Azure has the hybrid capability unlike AWS cloud [which has] only approach. Azure provides us the ability to create hybrid environments allowing us to leverage on premise resources and the benefits of cloud. Azure can also help in building Hybrid applications.

Pricing is the most important thing I would consider that needs improvement, pricing will play one of the important criteria in deciding between other cloud providers. It will also play a part in growth and adoption of Azure across the industries. So I think pricing is the area that needs improvement.
Azure has the space of improvement in PaaS offering, it can bake and integrate many services and tools which other PaaS provider excel in that space. PaaS is the next big thing Azure should focus on developing.
Integrating more developer specific features I would suggest need improvement. With a focus on cloud migration services and providing them, Azure should also focus on providing capabilities for developers focusing on development of cloud native application which will not just run perfectly on cloud but will excel in each space and will be efficient, resilient and scalable on cloud.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft Azure is well suited in the IOT space. It has one of the best IOT tools and services currently on the cloud. With the capabilities of running small business and mission critical applications, it excels in the IOT space and leaves all the competitors behind. Microsoft Azure is compliant so it removes the overhead of data migration. It's highly secured and even federally regulated. It is well suited for helping clients in the complete application lifecycle by using its PaaS offerings. Azure is expensive, but it offers packages for small to medium businesses which will be for free for some years or at really very less cost but it may come at the price of compute, data, space, memory etc. Azure is across the globe, it serves in 34 regions and 4 more regions in production so you can imagine the scale of Azure. It's highly available and scalable. Even though there are a number of improvements and developments to be done in Azure, Azure is one of the leaders in cloud giving a tough fight to AWS and maintaining its position closer to Amazon.

Read Aditya Sabadra's full review

February 22, 2017

"Microsoft Azure Review"

Stênio Pereira Filho

Senior System Analyst

Universidade de São PauloEducation Management, 10,001+ employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, our department is using Microsoft Azure as an extension of our private cloud. We are a public university and we have difficulties in buying hardware to expand our infrastructure. We use a public cloud as part of the process of having temporary expansion until the end of the buying process. We offer researchers an IaaS cloud and for now, we also use Microsoft Azure to host applications developed for PaaS clouds.

Pros and Cons

The possibility to link github repositories in deployments slots
Use of staging slots to deploy a web application with zero downtime
Datacenter in Brazil

The user interface works slowly on moderns browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
In some cases, it is hard to find what we want in the user interface.
Sometimes terminating (shutting down) a virtual machine does not succeed properly and the VM remains running in the background, billing it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft Azure is well suited to host virtual machines and applications, but not for a high-performance cluster to run parallel jobs for scientific research.

Read Stênio Pereira Filho's full review

February 14, 2017

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure? More like Fantazure! ...okay, I'll leave."

Brad Magyar

Programmer Analyst

National Inventors Hall of FameMuseums and Institutions, 51-200 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's being used across the whole organization via Active Directory, but our primary use is for hosting our websites. It provides a lot of customizability and functionality that most web hosts don't offer, and it gives us the flexibility that we need, with a great balance of performance and price. It's pretty bleeding edge and they provide solutions for pretty much anything you can think of through their marketplace. Highly recommended.

Pros and Cons

Customizability. Compared to other cloud providers, it's incredibly easy to make large, complex deployments rather quickly, and it gives you very granular control over every aspect of your deployment. Additionally, with PowerShell integration, you can do massive, system-wide changes via shell scripting.
Stability. VM stability is excellent. We've been on them for over 2 years, and haven't had a single outage that affected us, and any time we've had downtime, it was due to mistakes on our end.
Ease of use. Everything is really easy to find and configure. Fantastic UI.

Support. Their support is exactly as you're used to with Microsoft. Difficult to get a hold of, and we've had issues with tickets being lost and issues not being solved in a timely manner.

Likelihood to Recommend

[It is well suited for] website hosting, high-performance cloud-based SQL Server databases. [It has] deployment templates,
advanced features such as load-balancing, high availability groups, web apps, serverless architecture (Azure Functions), other bleeding-edge features and excellent documentation.

Read Brad Magyar's full review

February 13, 2017

Microsoft Azure Review: "It's Microsoft. It's Cloud. What else would you use?"

Hans Davenport

Senior Kofax Engineer

HMBComputer Software, 51-200 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Reseller

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft Azure has served a need with our company in being able to provide a scalable platform for our customers to be able to host managed services applications. Azure allows for predictable billing, placing resources in the right geographical location, and instant scaling for when we need to provide more horsepower for processing high volume blips.

Pros and Cons

Azure has allowed us to provide a platform that is easily resellable both from a management perspective as well as having the Microsoft name behind it, which is typically a trusted name for companies.
The billing platform is great for breaking down hosted solutions across multiple customers and the ability to geolocate servers through its multiple data centers allows for seamless service providing to customers around the US and internationally.
Resource scalability is a very powerful feature allowing us to pay the bare minimum during low periods and instantly expand our processing capacity when needed.
It is easy to spin up a new environment with the many different VMs available through the Azure marketplace.

Cost. Azure is much more costly than other platforms but that comes as a tradeoff with features and functionality.
The platform is easy to manage once configured and set up properly. The initial dive into the platform can be daunting for even the most seasoned Microsoft administrator.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for a hosting platform that is guaranteed to fill all government and regulatory platforms Azure is the way to go. There is a guarantee that any of your customer's requirements can be met or exceeded using this platform.

Read Hans Davenport's full review

February 16, 2017

Microsoft Azure Review: "Journey with Azure"

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used across the IT department. We deploy all .NET based applications in Azure environment.

Pros and Cons

Azure abstracts away a lot of the complexities, But that's all part of the natural transition to cloud computing, Applications have to be completely re-engineered to take advantage of the unique benefits offered by cloud computing, including the ability to scale and quickly ramp up performance.
Putting an app on the Web allows remote access from nearly every conceivable point, and that means "every single component has to be strong. If one of your components is compromised, the others shouldn't fall down."
Azure instances each include a fixed amount of storage but with AWS, you’ll need to purchase storage separately at an additional cost. That said, many IT pros agree that AWS storage is highly customizable to their needs which is a plus, but the pricing is not as straightforward as Azure.

As with anything, there are a couple of potential cons with Microsoft Azure. Unlike SaaS platforms where the end-user is consuming information (for example, Office 365), IaaS (Azure) moves business’ compute power from your data center or office to the cloud. As with most cloud service providers, Azure needs to be expertly managed and maintained, which includes patching and server monitoring.
Unlike local servers, Azure requires expertise to ensure all moving parts work together efficiently. A common mistake by business administrators that are not fully engaged in how well (or poorly) their cloud servers are operating is to over-provision cloud services. While a common mistake, on premise servers’ compute power does not translate equivocally in the cloud, potentially costing businesses thousands of dollars per year.
Need to provide customized SAN storage attached to VMs like AWS

Likelihood to Recommend

Migrating core business applications to Azure to ensure maximum efficiency. With a seamless migration and continued usage, helped us save thousands of $$$s on licensing, hardware, and support.
Microsoft Azure has a strong focus on security, following the standard security model of Detect, Assess, Diagnose, Stabilize and Close. Paired with strong cyber security controls, this model has allowed Azure to achieve multiple compliance certifications, all of which establish Azure as a leader in IaaS security. Not only is the platform protected, the end user is also covered with Azure. This multi-level of protection is essential as security threats continue to multiply daily across the globe, targeting end users and putting your business’ data at risk. Azure provides simple, user-friendly services for increased protection, such as multi-factor authentication and application password requirements.

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March 09, 2017

"Microsoft Azure Review"

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used for my academic project and then my previous company. So my intention is just to learn.

Benefits are: Only need to deploy the application and the rest is a Microsoft managed, hassle free environment. No need to worry about your Windows patching and updates; server running out of space, technical troubleshooting and maintenance cost. Time is saved in building up the servers and hardware non-utilization has been eliminated.

Pros and Cons

Lift-and-shift: So you can move your application in azure very easily.
Per-use pricing: As with other cloud services, Windows Azure charges the subscriber on per use basis. What this means is that if your application needs only two instances in the beginning, you will only pay for these two instances. At the moment your application starts needing four instances for example, you will start getting charged for those extra instances. This pricing model makes Windows Azure a great platform for applications that occasionally need a lot more resources than normal. It completely eliminates the need to purchase expensive hardware and software for building your applications.
DownTime is very minor. It's been really reliable.

Only Windows-centric applications are supported by Microsoft for technical assistance; hence it could be a tedious task to determine where exactly the fault is on an open source application running though windows Azure.
It needs a better User Interface to compete with its competitor.
More details in dashboard. It should be managed in a more subtype way.

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure has a great taste of built-in deployment tools for virtual machines and servers in the cloud. Little setup and configuration are needed on the user side, other than choosing the amount of CPU/nodes you require and what the purposes of the VM will be. The marketplace is divided into compute, networking, storage, web+mobile, databases, intelligence/analytics, IoE, security, etc. Customization can be done during the initial setup or after it's completed (for instance specifying a static IP address).

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February 17, 2017

Microsoft Azure Review: "My first time working with a colour .... a hue of blue"

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Mining & Metals Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are only just starting with our use of Azure. We started with some pilot initiatives and are looking at ways in which we can use it more extensively. Some of the pilots have been successful, others less so. Mobility seems to be a big driver, but also some of the difficult scenarios around product licensing are made better in the cloud.

Pros and Cons

The interface is simple and mostly intuitive.
Things are constantly updated and new functionality added quite often.
There is a lot of help available either online or through direct contact with Microsoft.

New features do not automatically replace old features. I see references to use the "old Azure portal" often in lab notes.
Not all functionality works as described. Keeping up with documentation seems to be an issue.
Features in the trial are not available everywhere - just from selected and biased locations - many trial components.

Likelihood to Recommend

This all depends on how much you are invested into the Microsoft ecosystem already. I would say many people are already using Microsoft Office, but if you are already making use of SQL, Microsoft BI, Office 365 etc., the transition to the cloud is likely to be seamless. Other areas like SharePoint Online etc., are all great bonuses.

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March 16, 2017

User Review: "Microsoft Azure Unplugged!"

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology

Utilities Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft Azure is implemented across in bits and pieces. It is mainly driven to save operational costs for non production workloads thereby reducing the requirement of physical hardware in the data center.

Pros and Cons

It's elastic and can easily be upgrade-able to meet specific requirements.
The performance is relatively better if properly designed.
It really performs outstanding for Microsoft suite of applications and can be tailored to meet the business requirements.

Its so much evolving [that is is] hard to catch the new feature updates.
SQL Azure is great but still needs to have CLR functionality.
It doesn't provide VMs which can support greater than 448GB RAM for hosting IAAS.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft Azure is best suited for organizations where they have Microsoft shop (SQL Server, Biztalk, Logic apps, etc).

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December 16, 2016

Microsoft Azure Review: "Windows Azure - Futuristic Public Cloud"

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Azure to host our mortgage application.
The reason to choose Azure was:
a) We can't afford to have any downtime of our application
b) At any point of time, user should need feel that application is behaving slow.
c) We would like to focus more on our line of business application instead of investing time in monitoring and deployment.

Pros and Cons

Azure service fabric is a great platform if you have plan to use micro service framework.
Azure Active directory is cool if you don't want to manage your own sts.
New Azure management portal is much better than old one.

Automating the build using ARM template is still not that state forward, we end up using power shell.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited: For any application with complexity ranging between low to medium, Azure has lot to offer. One can use LogicApp state forward instead of writing all the custom connectors as it does provide so many connectors out of the box. If you are looking for 0 downtime for an application, Azure is the go to guy.

Needs Improvement: If you are not a Microsoft shop then there is still very little you can do here apart from using VM.

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November 28, 2016

Microsoft Azure Review: "Great scalability. Server visibility to attackers needs improvement."

Hernán Silva

Front-end developer

Velocity PartnersInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

Score 7 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Windows Azure platform was used to host several web services for a marketing and software development company I worked for. Azure's scalability allowed the company to move away from several hosting providers to a single cloud hosting infrastructure. The major problem with Azure was replicating specific legacy environments for some projects.

Pros and Cons

Scalability: You can easily scale services and plans on the platform.
Very easy to start with.

I ran into some issues related to security: seems like Azure servers were being targeted by unidentified attackers. This is not Azure's fault on its own but it was trickier to fix due to the visibility Azure's servers have.
Trying to replicate legacy environments (CentOS 4, PHP 5.1 and the such) is not a pleasant experience, Azure presented a handful of barriers doing so. Modern environments had no such obstacles.

Likelihood to Recommend

Use it to start a project from scratch or to deploy modern environments.
Legacy Linux environments have difficulties to start and run smoothly.

Read Hernán Silva's full review

September 16, 2016

Microsoft Azure Review: "Moving in-house servers to the cloud with Azure"

Sean Lavery

Network Administrator

Charter Homes & NeighborhoodsConstruction, 51-200 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently we have started migrating some of our aging in-house servers to being hosted in Azure. This allows us to save on the cost of new hardware, licenses, and maintenance of having these servers physically hosted on site. With Windows Server 2003 going end of life this past year we realized we needed to upgrade or replace a bunch of our servers and we were looking at a substantial investment in new hardware and licenses. Azure allowed us to get around a lot of those issues, plus allowed us to gain some cloud replication for DR purposes.

Pros and Cons

Allows us to replicate our active directory to the cloud, giving us the ability to recover in the event of an issue with our local AD server.
Allows us to quickly spin up new servers to test software and get projects moving.
Has all the licenses and tools needed built right in so there are no extra fees... and you only pay for what you use so we can spin up a new server and grow it as needed.

There is a lot of constant change with the interfaces and not all of the features are always available in the newest iteration of the portals. For some things we still need to log in to the old portal. Change is good and it's great to see it continually evolving but it's sometimes hard to keep up with all the changes and to know which version of the portal you need to be working in.
It is dependent on your internet connection so if your current connection isn't fast, you could notice some lag and/or performance issues.
Documentation is sometimes lacking.

Likelihood to Recommend

For us it has been well suited for moving single use servers to the cloud. We were able to quickly replicate some in-house servers and move their functionality to the new Azure hosted servers.

We have some servers that we haven't moved as of yet though because of concerns over the speed of the connection (i.e. opening large CAD files over the connection).

Read Sean Lavery's full review

August 15, 2016

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure....It's a good thing!!"

Michele Coler

Project Manager/Office Manager

Art2link CorporationInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure services for our entire company. We have many users who are remote and it is a terrific way to collaborate. We love that we only have to pay for the capacity that we are actually using instead of having a rack of servers that aren't always being tapped, but are always running. It also saves on the costs of real estate for the server room and additional money that would have to be spent to upgrade and update the servers.

Pros and Cons

Capacity on demand: only pay for the space you need
Software licensing: It is cheaper to license and easier to license with cloud computing
Ease of Use: It is so easy to stand up applications on the cloud. The abilities for speed are far beyond that of on-premise.

Security: Although in reality it just a perceived issue that security is harder to manage in the cloud, the subject needs to be addressed and proven to not be a problem more often.
Old School Thinking: One of the biggest hindrances to the process. There are still people who just can't get their heads around Azure.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft Power BI, it is easier to set up and implement with SharePoint when you use Azure services. It allows for easier licensing: you can marry your SQL, SharePoint, Power BI licenses all into one place to purchase, implement and get them stood up and running as well.

Read Michele Coler's full review

August 15, 2016

Microsoft Azure Review: "Windows Azure cloud solution is cool."

Dominic Cheah

Technical Marketing Manager

Cloudian IncComputer Software, 11-50 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Windows Azure was used (by the previous organization that I was at) for emails and also for engineering development purposes. The business problem was to work on developing a software solution that would run in the Azure cloud.

Pros and Cons

Windows Azure console was intuitive. Easy to pick up and start rolling the solution out.
I like the fact that if you were previously familiar with Windows AD, this was all very easy to use to manage user access and grant privileges to specific products.
Hassle free. For example, deploying a SQL servers were a cinch. There's no need to deal with prereq. especially if you want to quickly deploy and run dev tests etc.

Security can always be improved. No matter what cloud product we use, security is always paramount to ensure the adoption of a cloud solution.

Likelihood to Recommend

Windows Azure is well suited for:

A corporate infrastructure that can be managed offsite (i.e. mail servers, etc).
Development and tests.

Read Dominic Cheah's full review

April 30, 2016

Microsoft Azure Review: "Easier to spin up VMs for your MySQL databases"

Matthew Hardesty

Founder

UpticaMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees

Score 6 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Internally, we have Ubuntu and Windows virtual machines deployed on Azure that support our hosting and internal application services (like JIRA and Confluence). We also use it for a variety of storage services. This helps us keep equipment costs at an overall minimum when compared to other hosting and virtual machine services.

Pros and Cons

Azure makes it very easy to spin up new websites with the web apps, virtual machines, sql databases, and more.
It's a great tool to test a prototype without committing to a hardware purchase.
The interface for browsing the available cloud services is very easy to use.

MySQL instances are provided by a third party. This is not covered by credit offered by programs like Microsoft BizSpark.
Billing status, while not obfuscated, is not always easy to see or predict.
Deleting a cloud instance can be cumbersome (and may take some time).

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure can help agencies deploy cloud applications swiftly and maintain a great deal of control over configuration.

Read Matthew Hardesty's full review

October 16, 2015

Microsoft Azure Review: "Great for Developers but Two management portals makes me want to break the screen"

Matthew Ambroziak

Cloud Solutions Architect

CSCInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

Score 6 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We implement a cloud management platform and Windows Azure is one of the many cloud providers we integrate with. We deploy custom workloads to be provisioned which also integrate with configuration management solutions such as Puppet. It is used within our department only for testing and our clients use it for development workloads.

Pros and Cons

Easy to deploy workloads with Visual Studio.
Debugging is great with IntelliTrace integration.
The ability to switch deployment slots makes going live to production easy and seamless.

Setting up auto-scaling of instances isn't as nice and intuitive as AWS.
Storage groups isn't necessarily difficult to work with, but it's more complex than it has to be.
The two management portals (original and new) have disparate levels of functionality and is very confusing if you don't know which has what you are looking for. This will resolve it self in the distant future, but in a competitive space such as this it's a turn off compared to AWS.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited when subscribing to Microsoft solutions from the marketplace. It is also very strong from a development perspective and integration with Visual Studio 2010.

From a usability perspective... sad to say, but the interface is overwhelming for new users that just want to spin up virtual machines and making simple changes can throw errors on the screen. Changes take time to take effect, so its hard to zip around and do what you need to do.

Read Matthew Ambroziak's full review

October 06, 2015

Review: "Microsoft Azure- Infrastructure as a Service"

arlen navasartian

Senior Web Developer

Apex EnergeticsHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 51-200 employees

Score 6 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It has been used across the whole organization.

Pros and Cons

Taking advantage of resources in the cloud allows you to decrease your costs for building and expanding your on-premises resources.
Knowing that security is one of the biggest concerns for companies considering a move to the cloud, Microsoft designed Azure with security in mind.
With Azure, you can develop hybrid applications that allow your on-premises applications to use cloud services, such as the cloud database and storage services.

SQL Agent itself is not supported on SQL Azure, so you cannot run jobs via the agent in the first place.
SQL Reporting is another feature that costs extra in SQL Azure.

Likelihood to Recommend

The key advantage of using Windows Azure is to decrease your costs for building and expanding your on-premises resources.

Read arlen navasartian's full review

April 08, 2015

Microsoft Azure Review: "Azure Cost Benefit Analysis"

Jake Hulse

CIO

Street SavingsMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were looking to expand our operations adding new functionality which would cause tremendous strain on our existing servers. The web and worker roles were the perfect solution, allowing us to develop a front end application tied to SQL Azure and an Azure Service bus which would relay data and messages to the back end worker role. The processing jobs could take over 10 hours of hard computing, so off loading this work was imperative. Azure gave us an inexpensive, robust, and immediately scalable solution to make this happen.

Pros and Cons

Scalability: Since Azure was set up with load balancing and scale in mind, its very easy to add more processing power to your business with just a few clicks and the monitoring reports give you excellent insight to evaluate if scaling is required.
Management: Azure's service management portal is extremely user friendly and intuitive, but the best part for me as a developer is how integrated it is into our development tools. It gives you access to all key areas of your account including the compute instances and your SQL Azure database.
Cost Management: Getting started with Azure is easy and low risk. Using the no-contract subscription and the low cost of the entry level systems, it was very easy for me to make the case that our company should try Azure. This was especially easy when you couple this low cost with powerful scalability should this new endeavor ramp up and gain traction.

Typically, our systems need to do more than simply host a web site or run a worker. Giving us the ability to integrate management of these types of services from Visual Studio in the role configuration would greatly simplify this process.
The earlier versions of Azure were of course lacking support in some key areas, and persistent storage in blobs was counter intuitive and difficult to manage. That said, with what seems to be an endless army of developers, support staff, technical writers, etc. Microsoft rarely misses opportunities to improve their services and Azure is no exception. Using the provided technical documentation and demo applications, working with persistent storage has because quite painless.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloud hosting is typically more expensive than hosting a physical box yourself. For this reason, the key aspects to consider are:

Can you host the solution yourself? If your company has the manpower and resources to host and support servers, then this is typically going to be the less expensive path in the long term with a much higher up front setup cost. Azure is the right solution for anyone looking to offset high initial server cost in favor of low recurring monthly payments until the project begins to draw in revenue.
Should you host the solution yourself? Hosting your own physical box requires a lot of planning and disaster recovery forethought which Azure takes out of the equation. Again, if your company lacks the resources/manpower to manage these tasks, Azure is the right solution for you.
Is the projects success guaranteed? Even if your company does have the resources to host your own servers, Azure gets you to market faster than hosting your own box. If the project becomes successful, you can always fall back to local hosting and use Azure for disaster recovery.

Read Jake Hulse's full review

March 16, 2015

Microsoft Azure Review: "Why you should or should not use Windows Azure for your organization"

Pedram Soheil

Senior Director of Software Development & Systems

Jet Support Services, Inc.Airlines/Aviation, 51-200 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Windows Azure for several customer facing websites, as well as our internal users.

Pros and Cons

Load Balancing
Scaling up or down depending on visitor traffic to web based system
Ease of deployment to the Azure Cloud

Quite a few hours of down times this past month (8 hours of down time)
SSL Support still needs work
Backup and restore of Azure SQL needs to be improved on

Likelihood to Recommend

The main question to ask yourself is can you live with down time or not.

Read Pedram Soheil's full review

February 25, 2015

Microsoft Azure Review: "Changed our nerdy lives."

Azim Manjee

Full Spectrum IT Warrior

RightpointInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Reseller

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our whole organization uses Azure. We have set it up to automate the build of test environments for deploying code for clients as well as set up instances of our infrastructure on the cloud. Azure has also become part of our DR plan as it is a great place to restore cloud backups of critical infrastructure VMs and get back up and running very quickly. Our developers love it, our Infrastructure consultants love it, our organization is having a ball with it. Prices are also very competitive as it is cheaper than Amazon.

Pros and Cons

The Quick provisioning of resources via VMM or Powershell script
Create development servers for testing code and applications
Create disaster recovery instances ready for DR Restores
Spin up standalone SQL or IIS sites without the overhead of a full server
Office 365 Azure AD single sign on into other cloud applications (CRM, ERP, etc)

Make it cheaper. Apply Moore's law to the pricing structure.

Likelihood to Recommend

Do you need scalable infrastructure for when your business needs change during non busy months or more busy times?
Are you doing a lot of development builds?

Read Azim Manjee's full review

Platform-as-a-Service

Ease of building user interfaces (16)

7.7

Scalability (20)

9.0

Platform management overhead (19)

7.6

Workflow engine capability (16)

7.3

Platform access control (20)

7.8

Services-enabled integration (20)

7.5

Development environment creation (19)

8.2

Development environment replication (17)

8.4

Issue monitoring and notification (19)

8.2

Issue recovery (17)

7.9

Upgrades and platform fixes (19)

8.0

About Microsoft Azure

Windows Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

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