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Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure

Overview

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft 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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Recent Reviews

Microsoft Cloud option

9 out of 10
May 31, 2022
Have consulted multiple companies to migrate their DC or different workload like SAP to Azure. Azure provides full digital transformation …
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Azure poor customer service

1 out of 10
February 22, 2022
Microsoft, why don't you understand customer service you send me an email regarding an urgent billing issue, I cant seem to fix it, and …
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Title For MS Azure

9 out of 10
September 29, 2021
One of the best Public cloud platforms available today, we use it for Iaas, Paas as well as SaaS. Easy to learn, good guiding UI. I highly …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Dynamic scaling (16)
    9.3
    93%
  • Elastic load balancing (16)
    8.8
    88%
  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (16)
    8.8
    88%
  • Pre-configured templates (16)
    7.1
    71%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
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Pricing

View all pricing

Developer

$29

Cloud
per month

Standard

$100

Cloud
per month

Professional Direct

$1000

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://azure.microsoft.com/en…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $29 per month
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Product Demos

Microsoft Azure Training - [3] Azure Accounts, Subscriptions and Admin Roles (Exam 70-533)

YouTube

Azure Tutorial For Beginners | Microsoft Azure Tutorial For Beginners | Azure Tutorial | Simplilearn

YouTube

Azure Training | Azure Tutorial | Intellipaat

YouTube

Azure Fundamentals complete Training in telugu

YouTube
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Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

8.6
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is Microsoft Azure?

Azure is a comprehensive computing platform, providing cloud infrastructure, products and services, developer tools, and innovations in data and AI. Azure has on-premises, hybrid, multicloud, and edge capabilities that offer the flexibility to innovate anywhere.

Developers can use their favorite languages, open-source frameworks, and tools to code and deploy. Azure includes over 200 physical datacenters arranged into more than 60 regions and upholds our customers' expectations with data residency, compliance, and high availability.

An example of some of the service areas Azure covers:

  • AI + Machine Learning

  • Analytics

  • Blockchain

  • Computing

  • Containers

  • Databases

  • Developer Tools

  • DevOps

  • Identity

  • Integration

  • Internet of Things

  • Management

  • Media

  • Stack

  • Migration

  • Mixed Reality

  • Mobile

  • Networking

  • Security

  • Storage

  • Web

  • Windows Virtual Desktop

Microsoft Azure Integrations

Microsoft Azure Competitors

Microsoft Azure Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Microsoft Azure starts at $29.

Amazon Web Services and SAP HANA Cloud are common alternatives for Microsoft Azure.

Reviewers rate Operating system support highest, with a score of 9.4.

The most common users of Microsoft Azure are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(974)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Justin Bongard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use our Azure storage accounts for blob storage and SMB shares. They don't work on all ISP providers or hotspots. They work on Verizon fiber and cellular hotspots but not one of our local ISPs. We use the SQL server and database services. I really like how easy it is to scale them up and down, live.
We also have a website app meant for internal use and use the SendGrid account connector. It is really nice to have easy white-listing for everything: websites, databases, etc. that we can trust. We host everything here instead of making servers VPN into our office.
Additionally, we have a site-to-site VPN between our offices and Azure. That works well and enabled us to turn off much of our public access.
We use the built-in VM backup tools and those have been really easy to use right there on Azure. Also, the snapshots automatically built into databases we have used several times. It creates a new database from a snapshot from every few hours from up to almost 30 days ago and then you just copy over whatever data you need.
.
  • Snapshots of databases are just built-in and super easy to choose one to recover from.
  • It's the way we sync our local domain controller with Office 365. I'm not aware of another option to do this. It has some limitations, but at least it keeps all the passwords in sync.
  • Samba file shares have been really nice. As long as the ISPs involved allow them, it's the easiest way to set up mapped drives shared with others. The performance is slow, but it's fine.
  • It is easy to manage the static public and private IPs that are being used, in one central place.
  • Adding extra data disks to VMS is nice and easy. The performance has been fine for our general use.
  • The AD sync between Office 365 and our controller syncs passwords well enough, but data is a pain. Usually, you have to update everything in AD and can't from anywhere else after you turn on the syncing.
  • Need more security controls and file-level access controls on SMB shares, unless I'm missing something.
  • More tooltips on settings would be helpful, at least if you turn on a novice mode or something. It's built for system admins and has a steep learning curve for people doing basic things.
I think it's well suited for just about everything I've done so far. I don't know how it compares to other options like AWS, but for us, it's been working great.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
N/A
N/A
  • We continue to move things to Azure because it's so flexible. If we were buying physical machines, at times they would be undersized, and other times, they would be very wasted. Azure allows us to scale things as needed. It has taken the responsibility of purchasing expensive equipment off our shoulders
  • It's much easier to keep archiving files to an SMB share on Azure than keep upgrading our NAS here. We don't hold back. If there's 1% chance we'll need a file but we don't want it around right now, we'll dump it up there.
  • It gives us better peace of mind for the security of systems to just get the service and not have to maintain all of the security patches for every OS to host those services.
It's very usable, but at times complicated because of all the capabilities.
Even the paid tier level of support didn't blow me away.
We do everything Microsoft and wanted the thing that would most easily be compatible with everything out of the gate. Pricing was comparable. It made sense to us.
OneDrive, Microsoft Office 365, Comodo Advanced Endpoint Protection (AEP), Comodo Antivirus
10
  • Web developer
  • Application developer
  • Network engineer
  • System Admin
6
To manage it, you just need to learn it. It's its own software you have to learn. It helps to already have networking and software development experience, but mostly, just learn the parts you need to and use and don't worry about learning it all. You can't. It's too much.
  • SQL databases
  • SMB shares
  • Active Directory sync services
  • VM servers, like to host our Domain Controller
  • Sharing files instantly with clients by using an SMB share. We send them a bat file to mount it, then we all have access to it without passwords, usernames, etc.
  • Website hosting
We see no reason to move anything off of it.
Matthew Ambroziak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.

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.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (8)
86.25%
8.6
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
90%
9.0
Dynamic scaling
80%
8.0
Elastic load balancing
70%
7.0
Pre-configured templates
100%
10.0
Monitoring tools
90%
9.0
Pre-defined machine images
100%
10.0
Operating system support
80%
8.0
Security controls
80%
8.0
  • It's been overall positive to work with in test environments.
Windows Azure shines from a development perspective.
30
Professional services / consulting
30
Architects and engineers
  • Storage
  • Virtual machines
  • Site to site vpn
  • Cloud management platform integration
  • Templating workloads
  • Writing custom integrations for RDS using our SDK
It works great for the clients that use it.
No
  • Product Features
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
I'd compare the products from different end user perspectives as a second phase.
  • starting virtual machines isn't all that difficult, if that's all you are looking to do without adding network complexity and tiers
  • Features that are stuck in limbo between the original portal and the new portal. very confusing and requires back and forth troubleshooting if you aren't familiar
There are much needed improvements to the new portal. It's getting there, but until everything is transitioned over it's going to be painful.
Amir Tabei | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We moved our entire SCM4Good platform and the SCM4Hunger Warehouse Management module to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This provides important gains in performance, reliability, and redundancy. In particular, Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network, with nodes in more than 16 countries worldwide, closes the distance for many of our developing country users in terms of Internet geography, and has given noticeable response-time improvements. Nathan Au, Project Manager for FareShare Brighton and Hove noted: “We use Aidmatrix’ SCM4Hunger to help receive, warehouse and dispatch food to our hunger agencies every day. We know we run high transaction volumes, especially during peak times each week. When Aidmatrix moved to the Microsoft Azure Cloud it was like night and day for us. We saw dramatic performance improvement in response times on average of 4x faster, in some situations it went as high as 10x. It’s amazing what a difference running the same application on the Azure Cloud can make. Now we can focus that much more time on getting food to those who are hungry.”
  • Easily scalable- You can adjust your resources as your customers grow
  • Preview Portal is a one stop dashboard to your infrastructure, application and financial elements to your instances
  • Worldwide locations to release your VM's where your customers are located
  • Affordable - You can control your cost without investing in hardware or other resources
  • Up to last week, I could have mentioned couple of shortfalls but they were all released with the new portal. Now I can easily see my estimated expenditure with each VM's individually
If you are going to use Azure solely as VM farm then it's easy to migrate. If you plan to move a legacy application auch as Azure Native, migration can be tricky. For example we had one application that had a third party (blue rhino) element and it had some compatibility issues that we had to re-write our app. Another would be moving an Oracle database to Azure as it needs to be the new version of Oracle. Azure Cloud doesn't accept Oracle 9G.
  • One of our key success stories with Azure is with our client who is in UK. When we migrated our application to Azure the performance level increased 10 fold. This is a direct quote from our customer - Nathan Au, Project Manager for FareShare Brighton and Hove noted: “We use Aidmatrix’ SCM4Hunger to help receive, warehouse and dispatch food to our hunger agencies every day. We know we run high transaction volumes, especially during peak times each week. When Aidmatrix moved to the Microsoft Azure Cloud it was like night and day for us. We saw dramatic performance improvement in response times on average of 4x faster, in some situations it went as high as 10x. It’s amazing what a difference running the same application on the Azure Cloud can make. Now we can focus that much more time on getting food to those who are hungry.”
  • Second success story is moving our Microsoft Replication Server to Azure Cloud for our SCM4Good Offline application. As our customers are in remote areas in Africa they need to sync their offline app with our replication server. The syncing time has dramatically reduced with Azure and produces less errors.
We have been one of Microsoft's Azure beta users from the beginning and we worked closely with Microsoft in migration effort. We have used several cloud applications before including Rackspace. Azure's large footprint was the key for us as our applications are SaaS and used worldwide. The ability for me to quickly and easily move servers from West US, to Asia, West Europe, etc.. was very important.
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.
20
The entire Delivery Team who are consistent of Architects and Engineers on a daily basis code and support our SaaS applications hosted on Azure Cloud. There are three platforms; SCM4Good, SCM4Giving and SCM4Hunger. More than 50,000+ leading business, nonprofit and government partners leverage our supply chain management software to accelerate their humanitarian relief work. Programs include international aid & development, hunger relief, disaster relief, and more.
5
Microsoft Azure is used by Architects, Sr. Architects and our Director of Engineering for creation of servers, deployments and migrations. I as the VP of Delivery use the preview portal for monitoring the resources and dashboard and also to estimate the cost and budget.
  • Redundancy
  • Worldwide locations where I have footprint
  • Cost control
  • SCM4Good offline syncing with MS Replication on Azure
  • We are not tapping into using Azure for Mobile Apps
Yes
We have not finished completing all of our migration but we are replacing a cloud space we had with Rackspace for our sandboxes and a full rack co-location with another vendor. The reason was a strategic move to partner with Microsoft to have all of our application in Azure Cloud and delivered in multiple locations around the world.
  • Price
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Since we had a good partnership with Microsoft and we also had a grant from Microsoft specific for the migration I wouldn't change anything.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
During the last two years we have been working on a strategy of moving each platform by themselves in terms of customer priority.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
  • Time - it took a little longer than we thought due to internal resources issues but not with Azure readiness
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.
Yes
The only reason I didn't give it a 10 rating as support is expensive.
Yes
Yes it was resolved quickly and with satisfaction.
I have not really had a major issues yet to answer this correctly.
  • Scaling
  • Cost management
  • Monitoring
  • Migration of application from one subscription to another Azure subscription
  • Deployment of some products that have unsupported 3rd party apps
  • Deployment of Oracle product due to version mismatch
As a VP i'm not your typical technical person and I'm able to easily use Azure in technical matters so I believe 9 is correct rating.
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