Transforming Data migration using Azure Copilot
Introduction Data migration is critical, yet it is one of the most complex tasks in any cloud adoption journey. Whether you’re moving workloads from on-premises environments, consolidating hybrid deployments, or transitioning from other cloud providers, the migration process involves multiple tools, intricate planning, and risk management. What’s New in Azure Copilot With the new “Storage Migration Solutions Advisor” capability in Azure Copilot, Microsoft is transforming this experience into a conversational, AI-driven workflow that accelerates decision-making and reduces operational friction. Why This Matters Traditionally, customers faced challenges such as: Weeks of advisory time spent choosing the right migration tool amongst the many (Azure Storage Mover, AzCopy, Data Box, File Sync etc., and various Partner solutions). High support overhead due to missteps during migration if a sub-optimal tool or service is used. The Storage Migration Solutions Advisor feature introduces: Conversational Guidance: Share your migration needs with Copilot, like talking with an Azure advisor. Scenario-Based Recommendations: Tailored suggestions based on transfer data size, protocol, and bandwidth. Expanded Coverage: Supports on-premises to Azure, cloud-to-cloud (AWS/GCP to Azure), and hybrid scenarios. Native and Partner solutions: Copilot can recommend Microsoft-native (1P) solutions and third-party (3P) tools for specialized scenarios —ensuring flexibility for enterprise needs. User Workflow: Step-by-Step Initiate Migration: Start with a prompt like “How can I migrate my data into Azure?” or “What’s the best tool for moving 1 PB from AWS S3 to Azure Blob?” Provide Details: Copilot will guide you by asking for details about your requirement, such as source type (e.g., NAS, SAN, AWS S3, GCS), protocol (e.g., NFS, SMB, S3 API), target (e.g., Azure Blob, Files, Elastic SAN), data size, and bandwidth. Azure and Partner Solutions: Based on your requirements, Copilot recommends the best-fit Azure solution. If a partner solution is better suited to your requirement, Copilot will also select and recommend the appropriate solution with links to its documentation and/or its Azure marketplace page. Examples Copilot generates recommendations for migrating an on-premises file share to Azure Files. Figure 1 Prompt from user invokes Copilot Migration recommendation workflow Figure 2 Copilot understanding protocols that customer environment has access to Figure 3 Copilot asking user's target Storage type Figure 4 Copilot gathering inputs on data size, network bandwidth availability and transfer direction Figure 5 Copilot recommendation for user scenario Copilot recommends Partner solutions for specialized migration scenarios Figure 1 Prompt from user invokes Copilot Migration recommendation workflow Figure 2 Copilot understanding protocols that customer environment has access to Figure 3 Copilot asking user's target Storage type Figure 4 Copilot gathering inputs on data size, network bandwidth availability and transfer direction Figure 5 Copilot recommendation for user scenario Pro Tips Run a small proof-of-concept migration to estimate throughput and timing, especially for large datasets or small file sizes. Combine Copilot’s recommendations with Azure Storage Discovery for visibility into your storage estate after migration. Getting Started Navigate to Azure Portal → Copilot. Try prompts like: o “Help me migrate an NFS share to Azure Files.” o “What’s the best tool for moving 1 PB from AWS S3 to Azure Blob?” Explore Manage and migrate storage accounts using Azure Copilot | Microsoft Learn for detailed guidance. Ready to simplify your migration journey? Start using Azure Copilot’s Storage Migration Solutions Advisor today and experience AI-driven efficiency for your cloud transformation.
Unlocking Storage Optimizations: Smart Tiering for Blobs and ADLS in Azure Storage
We are excited to introduce the public preview of smart tier for Azure Blob and Azure Data Lake Storage. Smart tier is a fully managed, automated data tiering solution that takes the guesswork and manual effort out of optimizing your storage costs. Smart tier continuously analyzes your data’s access patterns and automatically moves objects between the hot, cool, and cold tiers. Smart tier will keep regularly accessed objects on the hot capacity tier to optimize transaction costs and moves inactive objects after 30 days to the cool tier capacity tier and after an additional 60 days of inactivity to the cold capacity tier. If you access an object in cool or cold tiers again, it’s instantly promoted back to the hot tier, restarting the cycle. This ensures your data is always in the most cost-effective tier with zero manual intervention, making it the ideal online tier for datasets with mixed or unknown access patterns. Getting started Using smart tier is quick and easy: Enabling smart tier is simple: Just select smart tier as the default access tier through the storage account configuration for any storage account with zonal redundancy. Smart tier is available in all zonal public cloud regions, supporting both flat and hierarchical namespaces. Billing is straightforward: You will pay the regular hot, cool, and cold capacity rates, with no extra charges for tier transitions, early deletion, or data retrieval. Even moving existing objects into smart tier does not incur tier change fees. There’s just a small monitoring fee for the orchestration. Smart tier is configured at the account level. It can be configured via API or the Azure portal as the default access tier setting for new and existing storage accounts. Existing objects following the default access tier setting from the account will be moved to smart tier automatically. Objects that are explicitly tiered, i.e. to the hot tier, will remain in the same account and will not be moved to other capacity tiers. Smart tier will always keep small objects that are below 128 KiB in size in the hot capacity tier for efficiency and those objects will not incur a monitoring charge. If objects below 128 KiB increase in size, the smart tiering patterns apply for those objects as well. The automatic down tiering of inactive data, paired with the billing model simplifications of Smart tier can lead to large cost savings over time. In the metrics view of the storage account you can see the distribution across the capacity tiers for smart tiered objects by both object count and capacity. This account shows smart tier in action, moving inactive objects to the cool and cold capacity tier, thereby drastically reducing the capacity charges without any manual intervention. "2 years ago, Qumulo partnered with Microsoft to deliver the first truly elastic, unlimited capacity, fully managed file system, Azure Native Qumulo, which was built on Azure Blob," said Brandon Whitelaw SVP of Product at Qumulo. "Qumulo shared feedback with Microsoft on our ideal solution for data tiering and Microsoft clearly delivered, meeting all expectations. With today's smart tier announcement, Qumulo will immediately enhance our offerings with these new capabilities, delivering greater functionality and control over data lifecycle management. We are thrilled with the feature set Azure is delivering at launch” Note that smart tier is not supported with append and page blobs. Smart tier is the ideal tier to choose when you are looking to store your data on standard online tiers but are not fully aware of the data access patterns or do not want to manage data transitions across online tiers. Objects managed by smart tier are not subject to lifecycle management policies, ensuring that automated tiering decisions are based solely on access patterns. Smart tier for block blobs is now available in public preview for both Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage for storage accounts with zonal redundancies, including ZRS, GZRS and RA-GZRS. Unlock cost savings by adding smart tier to your blob storage accounts in one easy step: https://aka.ms/BlobSmarttier. Please reach out to us for any feedback or questions, we would love to hear from you: smartblob@microsoft.com
Priority Replication for Geo Redundant Storage and Object Replication is Generally Available
We are excited to announce the General Availability of priority replication for Geo Redundant Storage (GRS) and Object Replication (OR). Priority replication enhances the replication process of GRS/GZRS and OR, ensuring guaranteed 15 minute synchronization between regions and improved replication times. Enabling priority replication will also provide an official Service Level Agreement (SLA) for all user workloads that meet the SLA criteria. What is Geo Priority Replication? Azure Storage has offered users the choice of geo-redundant (GRS) or geo-zone-redundant (GZRS) replication for their storage accounts for several years. As displayed in the diagram below, with GRS/GZRS, data in the storage account is asynchronously replicated from the primary region to the secondary region: Since the data is asynchronously replicated, in the event there is a disaster in the primary region, and an unplanned failover is initiated, there is a possibility of some data loss. The Last Sync Time (LST) property of a GRS/GZRS account is currently used to provide users with the recovery point objective (RPO) of their account. The LST of the account indicates the most recent time that data from the primary region is guaranteed to have been written to the secondary region. All data and metadata written prior to the LST is guaranteed to be available on the secondary. However, any data or metadata written after the LST may not have been replicated to the secondary and could be lost in the event of a disaster impacting the primary region or an unplanned failover. Azure Blob Storage is now introducing Geo priority replication which will provide an SLA guarantee for the LST/RPO of Block Blob data in GRS/GZRS accounts. Geo priority replication enhances the replication process of GRS/GZRS storage accounts allowing for accelerated replication between the primary and secondary regions. The SLA guarantees the Last Sync Time of Block Blob data will be 15 minutes or less 99.0% of the billing month. With this guaranteed sync time, users can feel more confident about their data’s durability and availability, especially if there is an unexpected outage and failover in the primary region. Please refer to the official SLA Terms for a comprehensive list of eligibility requirements. Geo Priority Replication supports the following SKUs: GRS, RA-GRS, GZRS and RA-GZRS for Block Blob data. What is Object Replication Priority Replication? Without priority replication, object replication asynchronously copies all operations from a source storage account to one or more destination accounts, but completion time is not guaranteed. Object replication priority replication will allow users to obtain prioritized replication from the source storage account to the destination storage account of their replication policy. When you enable priority replication, you can benefit from the associated Service Level Agreement if your source and destination account are located within the same continent. The SLA will guarantee that 99.0% of operations are replicated from the source container to the destination container of their OR policy within 15 minutes for the billing month. Please refer to the official SLA Terms for a comprehensive list of eligibility requirements. How to monitor SLA compliance for Geo and OR Priority Replication? Geo Priority Replication: Geo priority replication introduces a new metric, Geo Blob Lag. This metric allows users to monitor their Blob Replication lag, the number of seconds since the last full data synchronization between the primary and secondary region. This will allow users to track the SLA compliance of their GRS/GZRS account. If an account’s Geo Blob Lag remains within 900 seconds (15 minutes), they can confirm the data replication is within SLA. To learn more about the Geo Blob Lag metric view, Geo Blob Lag Metric. Object Replication Priority Replication: Replication Metrics for Object Replication is now Generally Available. These metrics empower users to troubleshoot replication delays and will help users with priority replication enabled monitor their SLA compliance. Metrics now supported are: Pending Operations: Tracks the total number of operations pending replication from the source to the destination storage account of your OR policy Pending Bytes: Tracks the total volume of data pending replication from the source to the destination storage account of your OR policy These metrics are grouped into various time buckets including 0-5 minutes, 10-15 minutes and > 24 hours. Users with OR priority replication that would like to ensure all their operations are replicating within 15 minutes; can monitor the larger time buckets (ex: 30 mins – 2hours or 8-24 hours) and ensure they are at zero or near zero. Users also have other options such as checking the replication status of their source blob. Users can check the replication status of a source blob to determine whether replication to the destination has been completed. Once the replication status is marked as “Completed,” the user can guarantee the blob is available in the destination account. How to get started? Getting started is simple, to learn more about the step-by-step process to opt-in to Geo priority replication: Azure Storage Geo Priority Replication - Azure Storage | Microsoft Learn. Or if you would like to learn about the step-by-step process to enable OR Priority Replication, view: Object Replication Priority Replication - Azure Storage | Microsoft Learn. Feedback If you have questions or feedback, reach out at priorityreplication@microsoft.com.
Take Data Management to the next level with Silk Software-Defined Azure Storage
Note: This article is co-authored by our partner Silk. In today’s data-driven world, every enterprise is under pressure to make smarter decisions faster. Whether you're running production databases, training machine learning models, running advanced analytics, or building customer-facing applications, your data needs to be more agile, secure, and readily accessible than ever before. That’s where Silk’s software-defined cloud storage platform on Microsoft Azure comes into play — bringing performance, resiliency, and intelligence to data management across the cloud. With the recent addition of Silk Echo, you can now supercharge your Copy Data Management (CDM) strategy to ensure your data isn’t just protected, it’s available instantly for any purpose — a true strategic asset. Transforming Azure IaaS with Silk's Platform Microsoft Azure offers a rich ecosystem of services to support every stage of your cloud journey, and when paired with Silk, customers gain a game-changing storage and data-services layer purpose-built for performance-intensive workloads. Silk’s software-defined storage platform runs on Azure infrastructure as a high-performance data layer between Azure compute and native storage. It works by orchestrating redundant sets of resources, as close to the DB compute as possible. Aggregating and accelerating the native capabilities of Azure, enabling databases to reach the maximum physical limits of the underlying hardware. Silk makes use of the excellent L-series of storage optimized VMs and NVME media, ensuring the data is always quickly available and able to withstand multiple failures using erasure coding. Silk is designed to address common challenges customers face when migrating relational databases — such as SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 — to the cloud: Performance Bottlenecks: On-prem workloads often rely on ultra-low latency, high-throughput storage systems with features that are difficult to replicate in the cloud. Data Copy Sprawl: Multiple non-production environments (dev, test, QA, analytics) mean many redundant data copies, leading to storage inefficiencies. Operational Overhead: Managing snapshots, backups, and refreshes across environments consumes time and resources. Silk changes the game with: Extreme performance in the Azure cloud. Up to 34GB/s of throughput from a single VM. The combination of Silk and Azure provide a unique cost/performance balance, through the combination of a very low latency software defined cloud storage platform and sharing of Azure resources. Inline data deduplication and compression for optimized resource utilization. Autonomous, fully integrated, non-disruptive, zero cost snapshots and clones for effortless environment refreshes. Multi-zone resilience and no single point of failure. This makes it easier than ever to lift and shift critical applications to Azure, with the confidence of consistent performance, uptime, and flexibility. Elevating CDM with Silk Echo for AI While Silk’s core platform solves performance and efficiency challenges, Silk Echo for AI introduces an intelligent, AI-powered layer that revolutionizes how organizations manage and leverage their data across the enterprise. At its core, Silk Echo for AI offers next generation Copy Data Management capabilities that empower IT teams to accelerate digital initiatives, reduce costs, and maximize the value of every data copy. Key Benefits of Silk Echo for AI Smarter Data Copying and Cloning Silk Echo leverages AI to understand data access patterns and recommends the optimal strategy for creating and managing data copies. Instead of manually managing snapshots, you can automate the entire workflow — ensuring the right data is in the right place at the right time. Instant, Space-Efficient Clones Using Silk’s advanced snapshot and cloning engine, Echo creates fully functional clones in seconds, consuming minimal additional storage resources. Teams can spin up dev/test environments instantly, accelerating release cycles and experimentation. Cross-Environment Data Consistency Echo ensures consistency across copies — whether you're cloning for testing, backup, or analytics — and with AI-driven monitoring, it can detect drift between environments and recommend synchronizations. Policy-Based Lifecycle Management Define policies for how long data copies should live, when to refresh them, and who has access. Echo automates the enforcement of these policies, reducing human error and ensuring compliance. Optimized Resource Consumption Silk Echo minimizes redundant data storage through smart deduplication, compression, and AI-driven provisioning — resulting in cost savings of 50% or more across large-scale environments. Enablement for AI/ML Workflows For data science teams, Silk Echo provides curated, up-to-date data clones without impacting production environments — essential for model training, experimentation, and validation. Real-World Use Case: Streamlining Dev/Test and AI Pipelines Consider Sentara Health, a healthcare provider migrating their EHR and SQL Server workloads to Azure. Before Silk, environment refreshes were time-consuming, often taking days or even weeks. With Silk Echo for AI, the same tasks will be completed in minutes. Now, development teams have self-service access to fresh clones of production data — enabling faster iteration and better testing outcomes. Meanwhile, their data science team leverages Echo’s snapshot automation to feed AI models with real-time, production-grade data clones without risking downtime or data corruption. All of this runs seamlessly on Azure, with Silk ensuring high performance and resilience at every step. Joint Value of Silk and Microsoft Together, Silk and Microsoft are unlocking a new level of agility and intelligence for enterprise data management: Data-as-a-Service: Give every team — DevOps, DataOps, AI/ML — access to the data they need, when they need it. Free snapshots democratize data so up-to-date copies can be made quickly for any team member who can benefit from it. AI-Ready Database Infrastructure: Your infrastructure evolves from a reactive model which is addressing problems as they arise (i.e. triggering responses on alerts), to a predictive model that utilizes AI/ML to forecast issues and mitigate them before they occur by learning patterns of behavior. Silk enables real-time AI inferencing, for business-critical agents that require access to up-to-date operational data. Reduced Costs, Improved ROI: Storage optimization, reduced manual overhead, and faster time to value — backed by Azure’s scalability and Silk’s performance. Accelerated Cloud Migrations: Achieve the enhanced scalability and flexibility of a cloud migration for your Tier 1 databases without refactoring. Get Started Ready to take your data management strategy to the next level? Explore how Silk’s software-defined storage and Silk Echo for AI can accelerate your transformation on Microsoft Azure. Whether you're modernizing legacy systems, building AI-driven applications, or simply trying to get more value from your cloud investments, Silk and Microsoft are here to help. By embracing the power of Silk’s software-defined storage and Silk Echo, organizations can finally make their data in the cloud work smarter, not harder. Contact Alliances@silk.us for a deeper dive on Silk!Beyond Basics: Practical scenarios with Azure Storage Actions
If you are new to Azure Storage Actions, check out our GA announcement blog for an introduction. This post is for cloud architects, data engineers, and IT admins who want to automate and optimize data governance at scale. The Challenge: Modern Data Management at Scale As organizations generate more data than ever, managing that data efficiently and securely is a growing challenge. Manual scripts, periodic audits, and ad-hoc cleanups can’t keep up with the scale, complexity, and compliance demands of today’s cloud workloads. Teams need automation that’s reliable, scalable, and easy to maintain. Azure Storage Actions delivers on this need by enabling policy-driven automation for your storage accounts. With Storage Actions, you can: Automate compliance (e.g., legal holds, retention) Optimize storage costs (e.g., auto-tiering, expiry) Reduce operational overhead (no more custom cleanup scripts) Improve data discoverability (tagging, labeling) Real-World Scenarios: Unlocking the Power of Storage Actions Let’s explore 3 practical scenarios where Storage Actions can transform customers’ data management approach. For each, we’ll look at the business problem, the traditional approach, and how Storage Actions makes it easier with the exact conditions and operations which can be used. Scenario 1: Content Lifecycle for Brand Teams Business Problem: Brand and marketing teams manage large volumes of creative assets - videos, design files, campaign materials that evolve through multiple stages and often carry licensing restrictions. These assets need to be retained, frozen, or archived based on their lifecycle and usage rights. Traditionally, teams rely on scripts or manual workflows to manage this, which can be error-prone, slow, and difficult to scale. How Storage Actions Helps: Azure Storage Actions enables brand teams to automate the content lifecycle management using blob metadata and / or index tag. With a single task definition using an IF and ELSE structure, teams can apply different operations to blobs based on their stage, licensing status, and age without writing or maintaining scripts. Example in Practice: Let’s say a brand team manages thousands of creative assets videos, design files, campaign materials each tagged with blob metadata that reflects its lifecycle stage and licensing status. For instance: Assets that are ready for public use are tagged with asset-stage = final Licensed or restricted-use content is tagged with usage-rights = restricted Over time, these assets accumulate in your storage account, and you need a way to: Ensure that licensed content is protected from accidental deletion or modification Archive older final assets to reduce storage costs Apply these rules automatically, without relying on scripts or manual reviews With Azure Storage Actions, the team can define a single task that evaluates each blob and applies the appropriate operation using a simple IF and ELSE structure: IF: - Metadata.Value["asset-stage"] equals "final" - AND Metadata.Value["usage-rights"] equals “restricted” - AND creationTime < 60d THEN: - SetBlobLegalHold: This locks the blob to prevent deletion or modification, ensuring compliance with licensing agreements. - SetBlobTier to Archive: This moves the blob to the Archive tier, significantly reducing storage costs for older content that is rarely accessed. ELSE - SetBlobTier to Cool: If the blob does not meet the above criteria whether it’s a draft, unlicensed, or recently created, it is moved to the Cool tier. Once this Storage Action is created and assigned to a storage account, it is scheduled to run automatically every week. During each scheduled run, the task evaluates every blob in the target container or account. For each blob, it checks if the asset is marked as final, tagged with usage-rights, and older than 60 days. If all these conditions are met, the blob is locked with a legal hold to prevent accidental deletion and then archived to optimize storage costs. If the blob does not meet all of these criteria, it is moved to the Cool tier, ensuring it remains accessible but stored more economically. This weekly automation ensures that every asset is managed appropriately based on its metadata, without requiring manual intervention or custom scripts. Scenario 2: Audit-Proof Model Training Business Problem: In machine learning workflows, ensuring the integrity and reproducibility of training data is critical especially when models influence regulated decisions in sectors like automotive, finance, healthcare, or legal compliance. Months or even years after a model is deployed, auditors or regulators may request proof that the training data used has not been altered since the model was built. Traditionally, teams try to preserve training datasets by duplicating them into backup storage, applying naming conventions, and manually restricting access. These methods are error-prone, hard to enforce at scale, and lack auditability. How Storage Actions Helps: Storage Actions enables teams to automate the preservation of validated training datasets using blob tags and immutability policies. Once a dataset is marked as clean and ready for training, Storage Actions can automatically: Lock the dataset using a time-based immutability policy Apply a tag to indicate it is a snapshot version This ensures that the dataset cannot be modified or deleted for the duration of the lock, and it is easily discoverable for future audits. Example in Practice: Let’s say an ML data pipeline tags a dataset with stage=clean after it passes validation and is ready for training. Storage Actions detects this tag and springs into action. It enforces a 1-year immutability policy, which means the dataset is locked and cannot be modified or deleted for the next 12 months. It also applies a tag snapshot=true, making it easy to locate and reference in future audits or investigations. The following conditions and operations define the task logic: IF: - Tags.Value[stage] equals 'clean' THEN: - SetBlobImmutabilityPolicy for 1-year: This adds a write once, read many (WORM) immutability policy on the blob to prevent deletion or modification, ensuring compliance. - SetBlobTags with snapshot=true: This adds a blob index tag with name “snapshot” and value “true”. Whenever this task runs on its scheduled interval - such as daily or weekly, it detects if a blob has the tag stage = 'clean', it automatically initiates the configured operations. In this case, Storage Actions applies a SetBlobImmutabilityPolicy on the blob for one year and adds a snapshot=true tag for easy identification. This means that without any manual intervention: The blob is made immutable for 12 months, preventing any modifications or deletions during that period. A snapshot=true tag is applied, making it easy to locate and audit later. No scripts, manual tagging, or access restrictions are needed to enforce data integrity. This ensures that validated training datasets are preserved in a tamper-proof state, satisfying audit and compliance requirements. It also reduces operational overhead by automating what would otherwise be a complex and error-prone manual process. Scenario 3: Embedding Management in AI Workflows Business Problem: Modern AI systems, especially those using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), rely heavily on vector embeddings to represent and retrieve relevant context from large document stores. These embeddings are often generated in real time, chunked into small files, and stored in vector databases or blob storage. As usage scales, these systems generate millions of small embedding files, many of which become obsolete quickly due to frequent updates, re-indexing, or model version changes. This silent accumulation of stale embeddings leads to: Increased storage costs Slower retrieval performance Operational complexity in managing the timings Traditionally, teams write scripts to purge old embeddings based on timestamps, run scheduled jobs, and manually monitor usage. This approach is brittle and does not scale well. How Storage Actions Helps: Storage Actions enables customers to automate the management of embeddings using blob tags and metadata. With blobs being identified with tags and metadata such as embeddings=true, modelVersion=latest, customers can define conditions that automatically delete stale embeddings without writing custom scripts. Example in Practice: In production RAG systems, embeddings are frequently regenerated to reflect updated content, new model versions, or refined chunking strategies. For example, a customer support chatbot may re-index its knowledge base daily to ensure responses are grounded in the latest documentation. To avoid bloating storage with outdated vector embeddings, Storage Actions can automate cleanup with task conditions and operation such as: IF: - Tags.Value[embeddings] equals 'true' - AND NOT Tags.Value[version] equals ‘latest’ - AND creation time < 12 days ago THEN: - DeleteBlob: This deletes all blobs which match the IF condition criteria. Whenever this Storage Action runs on its scheduled interval - such as daily - it scans for blobs that have the tag embeddings = ‘true’ and is not the latest version with its age being more than 12 days old, it automatically initiates the configured operation. In this case, Storage Actions does a DeleteBlob operation on the blob. This means that without any manual intervention: The stale embeddings are deleted No scripts or scheduled jobs are needed to track. This ensures that only the most recent model’s embeddings are retained, keeping the vector store lean and performant. It also reduces storage costs by eliminating obsolete data and helps maintain retrieval accuracy by ensuring outdated embeddings do not interfere with current queries. Applying Storage Actions to Storage Accounts To apply any of the scenarios, customers create an assignment during the storage task resource creation. In the assignment creation flow, they select the appropriate role and configure filters and trigger details. For example, a compliance cleanup scenario might run across the entire storage account with a recurring schedule every seven days to remove non-compliant blobs. A cost optimization scenario could target a specific container using a blob prefix and run as a one-time task to archive older blobs. A bulk tag update scenario would typically apply to all blobs without filtering and use a recurring schedule to keep tags consistent. After setting start and end dates, specifying the export container, and enabling the task, clicking Add queues the action to run on the account. Learn More If you are interested in exploring Storage Actions further, there are several resources to help you get started and deepen your understanding: Documentation on Getting Started: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-actions/storage-tasks/storage-task-quickstart-portal Create a Storage Action from the Azure Portal: https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.StorageTask Azure Storage Actions pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage-actions/#pricing Azure Blog about the GA announcement: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/unlock-seamless-data-management-with-azure-storage-actions-now-generally-available/ Azure Skilling Video with a walkthrough of Storage Actions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdMFhdiNo8 Have questions, feedback, or a scenario to share? Drop a comment below or reach out to us at storageactions@microsoft.com. We would love to hear how you are using Storage Actions and what scenarios you would like to see next!Introducing Cross Resource Metrics and Alerts Support for Azure Storage
Aggregate and analyze storage metrics from multiple storage accounts in a single chart. We’re thrilled to announce a highly requested feature: Cross Resource Metrics and Alerts support for Azure Storage! With this new capability, you can now monitor and visualize metrics across multiple storage accounts in a single chart and configure alerts across multiple accounts — within the same subscription and region. This makes managing large fleets of storage accounts significantly easier and more powerful. What’s New Cross Resource Metrics Support Visualize aggregated metric data across multiple storage accounts. Break down metrics by individual resources in a sorted and ordered way. Cross Resource Alerting Support Create a single alert rule that monitors a metric across many storage accounts and triggers an action when thresholds are crossed on any resource. Full Metric Namespace Support Works across Blob, File, Table, and Queue metric namespaces. All existing storage metrics are supported for cross resource visualization and alerting. Why This Matters Centralized Monitoring for Large Environments Manage and monitor dozens (or hundreds) of storage accounts at once with a unified view. Fleet-wide Alerting Set up a single alert that covers your whole storage fleet, ensuring you are quickly notified if any account experiences performance degradation or other issues. Operational Efficiency Helps operations teams scale monitoring efforts without needing to configure and manage separate dashboards and alerts for each account individually. How To Get Started Step 1: Create a Cross Resource Metrics Chart Go to Azure Monitor -> Metrics. Scope Selection: Under Select a scope, select the same Metric Namespace (blob/file/queue/table) for multiple Storage Accounts from the same Subscription and Region. Click Apply. In the below example, two storage accounts have been selected for metrics in the blob metric namespace. Configure Metric Chart: Select a Metric (e.g., Blob Capacity, Transactions, Ingress) Aggregation: By default, a Split by clause on ResourceId is applied to view individual account breakdowns. Or view aggregated data across all selected accounts by removing the Split by clause. Example As another example, lets monitor total transactions across storage accounts on the Hot tier to view aggregate or per-account breakdown in a single graph. From the same view, select the Transactions metric instead. Select 5 storage accounts by using the Add Filter clause and filtering by the ResourceId property. Add another filter and select a specific tier, say Hot. This will show aggregated transactions on data in the Hot tier per minute across all selected storage accounts. Select Apply Splitting and select ResourceId to view an ordered breakdown of transactions per minute for all the Storage accounts in scope. In this specific example, only 4 storage accounts are shown since 1 storage account is excluded based on the Tier filter. Step 2: Set Up Cross Resource Alert Rules Click on New alert rule from the chart view shown above in order to create an alert that spans the 5 storage accounts above and get alerted when any account breaches a certain transactions limit over a 5 minute period. Configure required values for the Threshold, Unit and Value is fields. This defines when the alert should fire (e.g., Transactions > 5000) Under the Split by dimensions section, ensure that the Microsoft.ResourceId dimension is not included. Under Actions, attach an Action Group (Email, Webhook, Logic App, etc.). Review and Create. Final Thoughts Cross Resource Metrics and Alerts for Azure Storage makes monitoring and management at scale much more intuitive and efficient. Whether you're overseeing 5 storage accounts or 500, you can now visualize performance and respond to issues faster than ever. And you can do it for metrics across multiple storage services including blobs, queues, files and tables! We can't wait to hear how you use this feature! Let us know your feedback by commenting below or visiting Azure Feedback.Protect your Storage accounts using network security perimeter - now generally available
We are excited to announce the general availability of network security perimeter support for Azure Storage accounts. A network security perimeter allows organizations to define a logical network isolation boundary for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) resources like Azure Storage accounts that are deployed outside your organization’s virtual networks. This restricts public network access to PaaS resources by default and provides secure communication between resources within the perimeter. Explicit inbound and outbound rules allow access to authorized resources. Securing data within storage accounts requires a multi-layered approach, encompassing network access controls, authentication, and authorization mechanisms. Network access controls for storage accounts can be defined into two broad categories - access from PaaS resources and from all other resources. For access from PaaS resources, organizations can leverage either broad controls through Azure “trusted services” or granular access using resource instance rul es. For other resources, access control may involve IP-based firewall rules, allowing virtual network access, or by enabling private endpoints. However, the complexity of managing all these can pose significant challenges when scaled across large enterprises. Misconfigured firewalls, public network exposure on storage accounts, or excessively permissive policies heighten the risk of data exfiltration. It is often challenging to audit these risks at the application or storage account level, making it difficult to identify open exfiltration paths throughout all PaaS resources in an environment. Network security perimeters offer an effective solution to these concerns. First, by grouping assets such as Azure Key Vault and Azure Monitor in the same perimeter as your storage accounts, communications between these resources are secured while disabling public access by default, thereby preventing data exfiltration to unauthorized destinations. Then, they centralize the management of network access controls across numerous PaaS resources at scale by providing a single pane of glass. This approach promotes consistency in settings and reduces administrative overhead, thereby minimizing potential for configuration errors. Additionally, they provide comprehensive control over both inbound and outbound access across all the associated PaaS resources to authorized resources. How do network security perimeters protect Azure Storage Accounts? Network security perimeters support granular resource access using profiles. All inbound and outbound rules are defined on a profile, and the profile can be applied to single or multiple resources within the perimeter. Network security perimeters provide two primary operating modes: “Transition” mode (formerly referred to as “Learning” mode) and “Enforced” mode. “Transition” mode acts as an initial phase when onboarding a PaaS resource into any network security perimeter. When combined with logging, this mode enables you to analyze current access patterns without disrupting existing connectivity. “Enforced” mode is when are all defined perimeter rules replace all resource specific rules except private end points. After analyzing logs in “Transition” mode, you can tweak your perimeter rules as necessary and then switch to “Enforced” mode. Benefits of network security perimeters Secure resource-to-resource communication: Resources in the same perimeter communicate securely, keeping data internal and blocking unauthorized transfers. For example, an application’s storage account and its associated database, when part of the same perimeter can communicate securely. However, all communications from another database outside of the perimeter will be blocked to the storage account. Centralized network isolation Administrators can manage firewall and resource access policies centrally in network security perimeters across all their PaaS resources in a single pane of glass, streamlining operations and minimizing errors. Prevent data exfiltration: Centralized access control and logging of inbound and outbound network access attempts across all resources within a perimeter enables comprehensive visibility for compliance and auditing purposes and helps address data exfiltration. Seamless integration with existing Azure features: Network security perimeter works in conjunction with private endpoints by allowing Private endpoint traffic to storage accounts within a perimeter There is no additional cost to using network security perimeter. Real-world customer scenarios Let us explore how network security perimeters specifically strengthen the security and management of Azure Storage accounts through common applications. Create a Secure Boundary for Storage Accounts A leading financial organization sought to enhance the protection of sensitive client data stored in Azure Storage accounts. The company used Azure Monitor with a Log Analytics workspace to collect and centralize logs from all storage accounts, enabling constant monitoring and alerts for suspicious activity. This supported compliance and rapid incident response. They also used Azure Key Vault to access customer-managed encryption keys. They configured network access controls on each communication path from these resources to the storage account. They disabled public network access and employed a combination of Virtual Network (Vnet), firewall rules, private endpoints, and service endpoints. However, this created a huge overhead that had to be continuously managed as and when additional resources required access to the storage account. To address this, the company implemented network security perimeters, and blocked public and untrusted access to their storage account by default. By placing the specific Azure Key Vault and Log Analytics Workspace within the same network security perimeter as the storage account, the organization achieved a secure boundary around their data in an efficient manner. Additionally, to let an authorized application access this data, they defined an inbound access rule in the profile governing their storage account, thereby restricting access for the application to only the required PaaS resources. Prevent Data Exfiltration from Storage Accounts One of the most dangerous data exfiltration attacks is when an attacker obtains the credentials to a user account with access to an Azure Storage account, perhaps through phishing or credential stuffing. In a traditional setup, this attacker could potentially connect from anywhere on the internet and initiate large-scale data exfiltration to external servers, putting sensitive business or customer information at risk. With network security perimeter in place, however, only resources within perimeter or authorized external resources can access the storage account, drastically limiting the attacker’s options. Even if they have valid credentials, network security perimeter rules block the attacker’s attempts to connect from an unapproved network or unapproved machines within a compromised network. Furthermore, the perimeter enforces strict outbound traffic controls: storage accounts inside the perimeter cannot send data to any external endpoint unless a specific outbound rule permits it. Restricting inbound access and tightly controlling outbound data flows enhances the security of sensitive data in Azure Storage accounts. The presence of robust network access control on top of storage account credentials creates multiple hurdles for attackers to overcome and significantly reduces the risk of both unauthorized access and data exfiltration. Unified Access Management across the entire Storage estate A Large retailer found it difficult to manage multiple Azure Storage accounts. Typically, updating firewall rules or access permissions involved making repeated changes for each account or using complex scripts to automate the process. This approach not only increased the workload but also raised the risk of inconsistent settings or misconfigurations, which could potentially expose data. With network security perimeter, the retailed grouped storage accounts under a perimeter and sometimes using subsets of accounts under different perimeters. For accounts requiring special permissions within a single perimeter, the organization created separate profiles to customize inbound and outbound rules specific to them. Administrators could now define and update access policies at the profile level, with rules immediately enforced across every storage account and other resources associated with the profile. The updates consistently applied to all resources for both blocking public internet access and for allowing specific internal subscriptions, thus reducing gaps and simplifying operations. The network security perimeter also provided a centralized log of all network access attempts on storage accounts, eliminating the need for security teams to pull logs separately from each account. It showed what calls accessed accounts, when, and where, starting immediately after enabling logs in the “Transition” mode, and then continuing into Enforced mode. This streamlined approach enhances the organization’s compliance reporting, accelerated incident response, and improved understanding of information flow across the cloud storage environment. Getting started Explore this Quickstart guide, to implement a network security perimeter and configure the right profiles for your storage accounts. For guidance on usage and limitations related to Storage accounts, refer to the documentation. Network security perimeter does not have additional costs for using it. As you begin, consider which storage accounts to group under a perimeter, and how to segment profiles for special access needs within the perimeter.How Microsoft Azure and Qumulo Deliver a Truly Cloud-Native File System for the Enterprise
Disclaimer: The following is a post authored by our partner Qumulo. Qumulo has been a valued partner in the Azure Storage ecosystem for many years and we are happy to share details on their unique approach to solving challenges of scalable filesystems! Whether you’re training massive AI models, running HPC simulations in life sciences, or managing unstructured media archives at scale, performance is everything. Qumulo and Microsoft Azure deliver the cloud-native file system built to handle the most data-intensive workloads, with the speed, scalability, and simplicity today's innovators demand. But supporting modern workloads at scale is only part of the equation. Qumulo and Microsoft have resolved one of the most entrenched and difficult challenges in modernizing the enterprise data estate: empowering file data with high performance across a global workforce without impacting the economics of unstructured data storage. According to Gartner, global end-user spending on public cloud services is set to surpass $1 trillion by 2027. That staggering figure reflects more than just a shift in IT budgets—it signals a high-stakes race for relevance. CIOs, CTOs, and other tech-savvy execs are under relentless pressure to deliver the capabilities that keep businesses profitable and competitive. Whether they’re ready or not, the mandate is clear: modernize fast enough to keep up with disruptors, many of whom are using AI and lean teams to move at lightning speed. To put it simply, grow margins without getting outpaced by a two-person startup using AI in a garage. That’s the challenge leaders face every day. Established enterprises must contend with the duality of maintaining successful existing operations and the potential disruption to those operations by a more agile business model that offers insight into the next wave of customer desires and needs. Nevertheless, established enterprises have a winning move - unleash the latent productivity increases and decision-making power hidden within years, if not decades, worth of data. Thoughtful CIOs, CTOs, and CXOs have elected to move slowly in these areas due to the tyranny of quarterly results and the risk of short-term costs reflecting poorly on the present at the expense of the future. In this sense, adopting innovative technologies forced organizations to choose between self-disruption with long-term benefits or non-disruptive technologies with long-term disruption risk. When it comes to network-attached storage, CXOs were forced to accept non-disruptive technologies because the risk was too high. This trade-off is no longer required. Microsoft and Qumulo have addressed this challenge in the realm of unstructured file data technologies by delivering a cloud-native architecture that combines proven Azure primitives with Qumulo’s suite of file storage solutions. Now, those patient CXOs, waiting to adopt hardened technologies, can shift their file data paradigm into Azure while improving business value, data portability, and reducing the financial burden on their business units. Today, organizations that range from 50,000+ employees with global offices, to organizations with a few dozen employees with unstructured data-centric operations have discovered the incredible performance increases, data availability, accessibility, and economic savings realized when file data moves into Azure using one of two Qumulo solutions: Option 1 — Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) is a fully managed file service that delivers truly elastic capacity, throughput, and IOPS, along with all the enterprise features of your on-premises NAS and a TCO to match. Option 2 — Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) on Microsoft Azure is a self-hosted file data service that offers the performance and scale your most demanding workloads require, at a comparable total cost of ownership to on-premises storage. Both CNQ on Microsoft Azure and ANQ offer the flexibility and capacity of object storage while remaining fully compatible with file-based workflows. As data platforms purpose-built for the cloud, CNQ and ANQ provide three key characteristics: Elasticity — Performance and capacity can scale independently, both up and down, dynamically. Boundless Scale — Virtually no limitations on file system size or file count, with full multi-protocol support. Utility-Based Pricing — Like Microsoft Azure, Qumulo operates on a pay-as-you-go model, charging only for resources used without requiring pre-provisioned capacity or performance. The collaboration between Qumulo’s cloud-native file solutions and the Microsoft Azure ecosystem enables seamless migration of a wide range of workflows, from large-scale archives to high-performance computing (HPC) applications, from on-premises environments to the cloud. For example, a healthcare organization running a fully cloud-hosted Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) alongside a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) can leverage Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) to manage medical imaging data in Azure. CNQ offers a HIPAA-compliant, highly durable, and cost-efficient platform for storing both active and infrequently accessed diagnostic images, enabling secure access while optimizing storage costs. With Azure’s robust cloud infrastructure, organizations can design a cloud file solution that scales to meet virtually any size or performance requirement, while unlocking new possibilities in cloud-based AI and HPC workloads. Further, using the Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric, the enterprise is able to connect geographically separated data sources within one unified, strictly consistent (POSIX-compliant), secure, and high-performance file system. As organizational needs evolve — whether new workloads are added or existing workloads expand — Cloud Native Qumulo or Azure Native Qumulo can easily scale to meet performance demands while maintaining the predictable economics that meet existing or shrinking budgets. About Azure Native Qumulo and Cloud Native Qumulo on Azure Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) and Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) enable organizations to leverage a fully customizable, multi-protocol solution that dynamically scales to meet workload performance requirements. Engineered specifically for the cloud, ANQ is designed for simplicity of operation and automatic scalability as a fully managed service. CNQ offers the same great technology, directly leveraging cloud-native resources like Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), Azure Networking, and Azure Blob Storage to provide a scalable platform that adapts to the evolving needs of today’s workloads – but deploys entirely in the enterprise tenant, allows for direct control over the underlying infrastructure, and requires a little bit higher level of internal expertise to operate. Azure Native Qumulo and Cloud Native Qumulo on Azure also deliver a fully dynamic file storage platform that is natively integrated with the Microsoft Azure backend. Here’s what sets ANQ and CNQ apart: Elastic Scalability — Each ANQ and CNQ instance on Azure Blob Storage can automatically scale to exabyte-level storage within a single namespace by simply adding data. On Microsoft Azure, performance adjustments are straightforward: just add or remove compute instances to instantly boost throughput or IOPS, all without disruption and within minutes. Plus, you pay only for the capacity and compute resources you use. Deployed in Minutes — ANQ deploys from the Azure Portal, CLI, or PowerShell, just like a native service. CNQ runs in your own Azure virtual network and can be deployed via Terraform. You can select the compute type that best matches your workload’s performance requirements and build a complete file data platform on Azure in under six minutes for a three-node cluster. Automatic TCO Management — can be facilitated through services like Komprise Intelligent Tiering for Azure and Azure Blob Storage access tiers. It optimizes storage costs and manages data lifecycle. By analyzing data access patterns, these systems move files or objects to appropriate tiers, reducing costs for infrequently accessed data. Additionally, all data written to CNQ is compressed to ensure maximum cost efficiency. ANQ automatically adapts to your workload requirements, and CNQ’s fully customizable architecture can be configured to meet the specific throughput and IOPS requirements of virtually any file or object-based workload. You can purchase either ANQ or CNQ through a pay-as-you-go model, eliminating the need to pre-provision cloud file services. Simply pay for what you use. ANQ and CNQ deliver comparable performance and services to on-premises file storage at a similar TCO. Qumulo’s cloud-native architecture redefines cloud storage by decoupling capacity from performance, allowing both to be adjusted independently and on demand. This provides the flexibility to modify components such as compute instance type, compute instance count, and cache disk capacity — enabling rapid, non-disruptive performance adjustments. This architecture, which includes the innovative Predictive Cache, delivers exceptional elasticity and virtually unlimited capacity. It ensures that businesses can efficiently manage and scale their data storage as their needs evolve, without compromising performance or reliability. ANQ and CNQ retain all the core Qumulo functionalities — including real-time analytics, robust data protection, security, and global collaboration. Example architecture In the example architecture, we see a solution that uses Komprise to migrate file data from third-party NAS systems to ANQ. Komprise provides platform-agnostic file migration services at massive scale in heterogeneous NAS environments. This solution facilitates the seamless migration of file data between mixed storage platforms, providing high-performance data movement, ensuring data integrity, and empowering you to successfully complete data migration projects from your legacy NAS to an ANQ instance. Figure: Azure Native Qumulo’s exabyte-scale file data platform and Komprise Beyond inherent scalability and dynamic elasticity, ANQ and CNQ support enterprise-class data management features such as snapshots, replication, and quotas. ANQ and CNQ also offer multi-protocol support — NFS, SMB, FTP, and FTP-S — for file sharing and storage access. Additionally, Azure supports a wide range of protocols for various services. For authentication and authorization, it commonly uses OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML. For IoT, MQTT, AMQP, and HTTPS are supported for device communication. By enabling shared access to the same data via all protocols, ANQ and CNQ support collaborative and mixed-use workloads, eliminating the need to import file data into object storage. Qumulo consistently delivers low time-to-first-byte latencies of 1–2ms, offering a combined file and object platform for even the most performance-intensive AI and HPC workloads. ANQ and CNQ can run in all Azure regions (although ANQ operates best in regions with three availability zones), allowing your on-premises data centers to take advantage of Azure’s scalability, reliability, and durability. ANQ and CNQ can also be dynamically reconfigured without taking services offline, so you can adjust performance — temporarily or permanently — as workloads change. An ANQ or CNQ instance deployed initially as a disaster recovery or archive target can be converted into a high-performance data platform in seconds, without redeploying the service or migrating hosted data. If you already use Qumulo storage on-premises or in other cloud platforms, Qumulo’s Cloud Data Fabric enables seamless data movement between on-premises, edge, and Azure-based deployments. Connect portals between locations to build a Global Namespace and instantly extend your on-premises data to Azure’s portfolio of cloud-native applications, such as Microsoft Copilot, AI Studio, Microsoft Fabric, and high-performance compute and GPU services for burst rendering or various HPC engines. Cloud Data Fabric moves files through a large-scale data pipeline instantly and seamlessly. Use Qumulo’s continuous replication engine to enable disaster recovery scenarios, or combine replication with Qumulo’s cryptographically locked snapshot feature to protect older versions of critical data from loss or ransomware. ANQ and CNQ leverage Azure Blob’s 11-nines durability to achieve a highly available file system and utilizes multiple availability zones for even greater availability — without the added costs typically associated with replication in other file systems. Conclusion The future of enterprise storage isn’t just in the cloud — it’s in smart, cloud-native infrastructure that scales with your business, not against it. Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) and Cloud Native Qumulo (CNQ) on Microsoft Azure aren’t just upgrades to legacy storage — they’re a reimagining of what file systems can do in a cloud-first world. Whether you're running AI workloads, scaling HPC environments, or simply looking to escape the limitations of aging on-prem NAS, ANQ and CNQ give you the power to do it without compromise. With elastic performance, utility-based pricing, and native integration with Azure services, Qumulo doesn’t just support modernization — it accelerates it. To help you unlock these benefits, the Qumulo team is offering a free architectural assessment tailored to your environment and workloads. If you’re ready to lead, not lag, and want to explore how ANQ and CNQ can transform your enterprise storage, reach out today by emailing Azure@qumulo.com. Let’s build the future of your data infrastructure together.Building a Scalable Web Crawling and Indexing Pipeline with Azure storage and AI Search
In the ever-evolving world of data management, keeping search indexes up-to-date with dynamic data can be challenging. Traditional approaches, such as manual or scheduled indexing, are resource-intensive, delay-prone, and difficult to scale. Azure Blob Trigger combined with an AI Search Indexer offers a cutting-edge solution to overcome these challenges, enabling real-time, scalable, and enriched data indexing. This blog explores how Blob Trigger, integrated with Azure Cognitive Search, transforms the indexing process by automating workflows and enriching data with AI capabilities. It highlights the step-by-step process of configuring Blob Storage, creating Azure Functions for triggers, and seamlessly connecting with an AI-powered search index. The approach leverages Azure's event-driven architecture, ensuring efficient and cost-effective data management.
