Azure is simple, easy and too hard to pass up.
August 11, 2019

Azure is simple, easy and too hard to pass up.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Azure

We use Microsoft Azure both divisionally and corporately. We have a partner-agreement with Microsoft and a significant investment in order to migrate as much of our server infrastructure into the cloud as we can. This allows us to be more flexible in hiring since servers a not on-prem and location-based, and given us access to tools we never had before. The centralized billing is a huge asset.
  • Transparency to what everyone in the Org you support is working on.
  • The centralized billing and administrator controls allow us great organization and flexibility to keep things centralized yet virtually based.
  • The access to the multitude of options to enhance your cloud performance and experience is unparalleled.
  • I don’t like the pre-paid billing. Forking over a boat-load of money up to a year before you use a service is a financial loss for us on the interest.
  • Feels as if there are too many options, bells, and whistles you could add.
  • With so many options available, it’s really up to you to discover if they are helpful to you or not. Some of the options I’ve never heard of before, and documentation is hard to come by.
  • Better allocation of our financial resources by scaling up or down only when needed.
  • Easier to manage our infrastructure because you can do it from anywhere, even from your phone in a pinch. Required fewer dedicated or less-costly personnel.
  • Backup and storage are so cheap we can be in a better position to recover in case of any major issue.
Such a great platform for a novice or expert to use. There is significant training available to learn how to do complex things with little to know background doing them before. Especially if you live close to a Microsoft training center, they offer many courses for free on site. Even if not, the virtual training they provide is also free and plentiful.
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.
There are lots of players in this space these days, but Microsoft and AWS are the two most visible and easiest to get connected with. We were using AWS first, and have been using both for some time, but have now converted entirely over to Azure just for the ease of management, billing and access. Speed was also a factor. We were seeing less lag when remoting into Azure.
Azure Active Directory, Azure API Management, Azure Bot Service, Azure SQL Database, Azure Search, Google Ad Manager, Google Ads (formerly AdWords), Google Analytics, Google Analytics Premium, Google BigQuery, Google Classroom, Google Charts, Google Drive, Google Forms, Google Maps API, Google Tag Manager
This is just a fantastic platform for dipping your toes into new technologies or running parallel testing of tings like ETL’s and BI Tools. Storage is so cheap and you can switch things on and off at will to save costs. Even if you are a 1-server company just managing email and file storage, going virtual is simply the best option. We still have a few on-prem servers and old Oracle items that we are swiftly moving to eliminate because the cloud is just that much easier and cost effective.