Moving in-house servers to the cloud with Azure
September 16, 2016
Moving in-house servers to the cloud with Azure
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Windows Azure
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.
- 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.
- It has definitely helped us save on hardware and licensing.
We looked a little bit at other cloud hosted servers and applications but nothing had anything close to the features and ability to grow with our needs that we found with Azure.