To understand the need to hire a new service, whether analog or digital, it is important to start from a problem (theoretical or real) in our business, and the reality and context both at the beginning and at the end of the process.
When we talk about our business applications, for example, many of them store a large number of files. From static resources for web pages (photos, videos, etc.), to critical business files, through confidential documents, forms, or billing templates.
With On-Premise or local storage, managing all these files can become a hassle for our departments due to all the policies and processes involved:
All these problems now have a solution: Azure Storage will help us manage our files more comfortably and efficiently. And all from the cloud.
Azure Storage is a set of services that offers scalable and massive “object” storage compared to other online storage formats.
It also allows us to store files from our Azure virtual machines (VMs), cloud archiving systems, secure source message storage, and a NoSQL store, among other services, on a virtual hard drive. All of these have advantages for their use, such as:
The main Azure Storage products at the technological enterprise level, especially for virtual machines and applications, are:
An object store of all kinds, massively scalable to your needs for text and binary data. It supports Data Lake Storage Gen2 for big data analytics. With Active Directory and RBAC integration, you’ll be protected against advanced threats and unwanted access.
Managed file shares for on-premises and cloud deployments. You can mount those files on any OS to receive data from all kinds of sources.
Trusted messaging service between application components. Helps during workload peaks, preventing dependent or individual systems from collapsing. You can control the flows, and add or remove worker nodes depending on the level of traffic in your applications.
It is a NoSQL store for schema-free storage of structured and semi-structured data. Tables are intended to store at the petabyte scale but remain flexible with the data you can store. It even allows you to create applications with various types of code languages and access from HTTP/HTTPS in any browser.
Large storage volumes for Azure virtual machines. Designed to be durable and high-performance for local and cloud connections. The drives have an error rate of almost 0%, and automatically encrypt the stored data so that it can be shared with more than one company, favoring profitability for your pocket.
Azure Storage allows us to easily access our files from different platforms. It allows us to forget about the maintenance of the associated infrastructure. It allows us to have the data replicated and highly available for any type of load that is required. And it does so while maintaining security and privacy.
Also noteworthy is the scalability with which all services can be managed: you contract the level of performance you need at the moment and change it the instant those needs change, without complications in billing and availability of your data.
You can find more information from Microsoft Docs, where you will find more detailed guides on each of its capabilities.