Real users at IT Central Station reviewed Microsoft Azure and AWS, as we take a side-by-side look at how each solution has improved the organizations of enterprise tech professionals.

In their 2017 reviews of the leading PaaS cloud solutions, users discuss factors such as organizational improvements, scalability, deployment, and others.

Organizational Improvements

How Has Microsoft Azure Improved Your Organization?

“Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating hybrid solutions provides us with greater confidence in higher availability. Storage has made remote access to files much more painless and easy. Using SSO has also been great reducing the number of passwords and locations required to use them.” (Aaron Krytus, Network Manager/Senior Network Engineer at Warnock, Tanner & Associates)

How Has Amazon AWS Improved Your Organization?

“Everything is moving into the cloud and AWS is the leader. Not understanding puts a person behind. I’ve worked with charities so the ability to host a static website in an S3 bucket at very low cost is great. Also, the ability to scale up and down, depending on project and funding status is ideal for the charity sector.“ (Aimee White, Website and Ecomm at a retail company)

Scalability Issues

Have You Experienced Any Scalability Issues with Microsoft Azure?

“Scalability is Microsoft’s big advantage. At any time, you can add or take away from your servers growing them or shrinking them to your needs. You can even automate this process.  I personally do not get into Enterprise solutions, but it would appear that the G series is quite scalable.” (Aaron Krytus, Network Manager/Senior Network Engineer at Warnock, Tanner & Associates)

Have You Experienced Any Scalability Issues with Amazon AWS?

“Scale and flexibility are bound by the size of your budget or credit card spending limit along with what availability zones and other options you choose. Integration with other AWS services, including Import/Export where you can ship large amounts of data to Amazon using different media and mediums. Note that AWS has also made a statement of direction (SOD) that S3 will be enhanced to seamless move data in and out of Glacier using data policies.” (Greg Schulz, Consultant at StorageIO)

Deployment Issues

Have You Experienced Any Deployment Issues with Microsoft Azure?

“There is a learning curve involved at first glance. Azure has now grown so big it’s quite overwhelming. I did not experience any issues with the Azure solution itself as much as I did understanding how to do it.” (Aaron Krytus, Network Manager/Senior Network Engineer at Warnock, Tanner & Associates)

Have You Experienced Any Deployment Issues with Amazon AWS?

“The only problems I had were with Amazon authorizing our account initially. That seemed to take days rather than the quoted hours. That involved a lot of talking to customer services for no apparent reason.” (Aimee White, Website and Ecomm at a retail company)