Blob Storage

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Azure Blob Storage, an Azure Storage offering, provides object-based storage for unstructured data, often used as the basis for custom data lakes. Blob Storage is the core data storage service that underpins many other Microsoft services, such as Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Dataverse (part of Power Platform), Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure SQL Database, OneLake, RedisCache, and Cosmos DB.

Product: Blob Storage

Licensing: Blob Storage

Near-Term Roadmap (2026–2027)

Recent Blob Storage development focuses on reducing management effort and improving security and resilience. Smart tier automatically moves block blobs among the hot, cool, and cold tiers as access patterns change. This can reduce storage costs when access is difficult to predict while eliminating the need to create and maintain life cycle rules.

Other recent additions strengthen security and business continuity. Customer-managed planned failover and priority replication for geo-redundant accounts help organizations test recovery plans and restore operations more quickly. Entra ID authentication for Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), prefix-scoped user delegation Shared Access Signature (SAS), and client-side data-integrity protections provide more granular access control and reduce the security risks associated with local credentials and broadly scoped tokens.