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Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage

Overview

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Microsoft's Blob Storage system on Azure is designed to make unstructured data available to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage.

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Recent Reviews

Gets the job done

9 out of 10
March 26, 2022
Incentivized
Azure Blob Storage is equivalent to Amazon's S3, but better because it supports HTTPS. It lets us host files of any size and automatically …
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Awards

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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees

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Pricing

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Block Blobs

$0.0081

Cloud
per GB/per month

Azure Data Lake Storage

$0.0081

Cloud
per GB/per month

Files

$0.058

Cloud
per GB/per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure Blob Storage Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft's Blob Storage system on Azure is designed to make unstructured data available to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Azure Blob Storage are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(79)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-8 of 8)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 27, 2023

Cloud storage solution

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Blob Storage offers an S3-compatible API for storing files on the cloud. It is easy to use with good APIs and affordable.<br><br>It works well for storing static files and as a place to store/host attachments uploaded by users in the cloud.<br><br>It also is covered by the Microsoft Defender security product also offered by Azure which provides additional security including scanning for malware.
Pros and Cons
  • AWS S3-compatible API
  • Easy to use
  • Cost-effective
  • Secure
  • Web UI can be somewhat clunky
Likelihood to Recommend
Hosting and serving of static files.

Using in conjunction with Azure CDN for faster delivery of content

Usage as storage for cloud-native applications (e.g. storage of uploaded user content)
April 25, 2022

Azure Blob Storage - a cost-effective and sensible option

Verified User
Contributor in Other
Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Azure Blob Storage as a staging ground for storing spreadsheet files needed for a forecasting model. We were looking for a cost-effective storage solution that could also accommodate different data types. Additionally, files that were not accessed frequently could be stored in archive storage, allowing more flexibility for the user.
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to work with - drag and drop
  • Capable of long term retention
  • Relatively low cost
  • Good for different data formats
  • Allows archival storage
  • UI needs improvement
  • Search for files can be slow
  • Additional details in documentation would be nice
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Blob Storage is well suited for cases where you are working with different data formats and looking for cost-effective storage solutions based on access frequency. Another area of strength is the encryption of data at rest, and encryption can be managed on your own. However, it may not be appropriate for transferring large data very fast.
April 01, 2022

Azure Blob Storage is cheap and effective for backups and audit logs

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We're using it to store SQL Server backups and audit logs. It's relatively cheap storage and because our data already exists in Azure, there are no ingress or egress fees. It's secure, always available, and very easy to access and use.
Pros and Cons
  • We can backup directly from Azure VMs running SQL Server, no copying around.
  • We can store SQL Audit logs directly in Azure Storage, no copying around.
  • So far we haven't run into anything that's a problem for us or that we'd do differently.
Likelihood to Recommend
As mentioned earlier, we backup directly from our SQL Servers running on VMs to our Azure Blob Storage accounts and we have SQL Server Audits set to write directly to Azure Blob Storage. Azure Storage Explorer makes it drag and drop simple to copy files around/download them.
March 26, 2022

Robust, Scalable and Secure Storage

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure Blob Storage as a centralized location for storing Customer's documents (attachment) specific to a lead/cases/complaints/customer 360 module implemented using Dynamics 365. We also Azure Blob Storage for storing customers' data, which we then use for generating Power BI Reports. Earlier these were stored either in the respective applications or some on-premise-based solutions.
Pros and Cons
  • Ease of use both through Azure Portal as well as API.
  • Cost-effective solution for storing a large amount of data compared to other storage solutions.
  • Scalability, Security, and Performance are the other key aspects of Azure Blob Storage that are easily manageable through Admin Console.
  • If we are transferring huge amount of data (outbound), it can get quite expensive.
  • With new features being added constantly, although a good thing, at times it becomes difficult to keep up with the changes. Documentation needs to keep UpToDate and should include best practices.
  • Performance can be improved especially when it comes to cold storage.
Likelihood to Recommend
If an organization is already using Azure Cloud or Microsoft Office Products using Azure Blob for all their storage need is a no-brainer considering its seamless integration with all the different Microsoft Products. Those who are not into Microsoft Azure Platform can still compare it with Google, Azure, or any other Cloud Storage solutions before deciding on Azure Blob Storage.
March 26, 2022

Gets the job done

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Investment Management Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Blob Storage is equivalent to Amazon's S3, but better because it supports HTTPS. It lets us host files of any size and automatically replicates them across several regions. It offers various tiers of storage so we can choose the price/performance we want based on our business requirements. It has robust access controls to ensure only the correct program/person accesses the files.
Pros and Cons
  • Flexible access control with Shared Access Signatures.
  • Encryption of files.
  • Serving files encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
  • Would be nice if it offered an S3 API for easier portability.
  • Would be nice if it was cheaper.
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Blob Storage is great for storing files of all types and making them accessible anywhere across the world. Shared access signatures can provide temporary access to a file, which is nice when compared to competitors like S3 since the access control is embedded in the URL, rather than needing to use an AWS identity.
February 24, 2020

Azure Blob Storage and Panzura - A win for the civil engineering field

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Civil Engineering Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We currently use Azure Blob Storage to back-end our Panzura implementation. We keep Azure Blob Storage files as our true source of data and Panzura file caching devices at each location that has a subset of our data. It houses all of our critical business files and does it for a substantial decrease in costs vs. our old on-prem storage. This is the primary solution we use for our core business and is used across all departments.
Pros and Cons
  • Reduced cost. We were able to reduce our storage infrastructure by several hundred terabytes by consolidating redundant copies and dedupe/compression on files.
  • Extremely high level of redundancy. We can replicate data in a variety of ways that we would never have been capable of on our own hardware.
  • Unstructured data makes it harder to conceptualize what we have but with partners like Panzura that has been a non-issue for us.
  • Not always easy to understand the different models or tiers you can pick from when purchasing.
Likelihood to Recommend
The only real use case we have is with caching devices using blob storage as the backend. Azure Blob Storage is phenomenal for that. Trying to eliminate your file server to use this may not go as well, though. Microsoft has other products meant to fill that option.
January 17, 2020

Ease of use and efficiency makes Azure Blob a win!

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure storage to handle data ingestion and storage for some BI reporting. A lot of the heavy lifting is done via some of the great Powershell commands via Azure. The ease of use and the ability to -flag upload file sizes really are useful. It has also been an excellent way for us to share data with not only internal users but also customers.
Pros and Cons
  • Ease of use.
  • Efficient in data ingestion.
  • Documentation for Powershell v10.
  • File transfer size starting larger than 4mb.
Likelihood to Recommend
It fits exactly what we need it to do once we pieced together documentation from multiple sources. The data ingress and egress have fit our business model so far. If you are pulling or pushing large sets of data, Powershell v10 allows you to flag data transfer sizes to cut down on some of the cost if you have a large enough data pipe to handle the transfer speeds. There are some limitations on Blob storage size but we are far off with our projects that this is not a problem for us. Make sure to look at these Blob limits if you are going to be moving extremely large data sets.
November 08, 2019

Azure Blob Storage - It's worth using in your environment

MW
Michael Ward
Sr Systems Administrator
USI (Insurance, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Azure Blob storage is currently used in various ways at our company.

First, like cloud storage for various Azure SaaS platforms. Things like managed SQL instances and data lake storage for Azure AI / ML. It is useful in that it is tiered, so you can use hot tier for these use cases.

Secondly, a more common use is to use the cold and archive tiers as a cheap location to store long-term backups and archives. We think of it as a replacement for tape offloading in our DR strategy. One thing to be away from is that the cost to bring those backups/archives back from the cloud can be very high. So this is used more as a place of last resort for disaster recovery currently, but it definitely has its place.

Pros and Cons
  • Tiering - Hot/Cold/Archive.
  • It allows you to pay for the performance you need for the task at hand.
  • Easily consumed and accessed.
  • Expensive to egress your data, especially in a true DR scenario from cold or archive tier.
Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for newly developed micro applications that need to access data in the cloud.

Well suited for being the storage layer for SaaS offerings within the Azure Service Catalog. The integration is usually built-in.

Well suited for backup storage target for long-term RPO objectives, when the expectation of actual retrieval need is very low.

Well suited for long-term offsite archival storage.

Well suited for emergency storage needs (burst storage) for an immediate need.

Not appropriate for data that has high amounts of ingress and egress churn.

Not appropriate for applications that require ultra-low latency response time from the storage layer.

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