Azure Storage Solutions: A Cost-Effective Way

If your business is in dire need of shifting to cloud-based solutions and storage at a lower cost, then MicrosoftAzure Storage solutions are the best choice to consider. Storage solutions offer businesses a reliable, low-cost way to store and archive their data.

By leveraging the cloud services of Microsoft Azure, organizations can access the scalability and reliability necessary to maintain their data for long-term storage and archiving. With features such as serverless compute, automated tiering, disaster recovery, and data encryption, Azure Storage is a great choice for businesses of all sizes.

According to the report, Microsoft Azure was the second-largest cloud service provider and had a market share of 24% of total cloud infrastructure services spending in the second quarter of 2022.

In this article, you will get to know various types of Microsoft Azure storage solutions , costing models, ways to optimize the cost, and the benefits of using Azure storage for businesses.

Types of Azure Storage Solutions

Azure Storage is a cloud-based solution that offers a variety of storage options. The categories of storage options are blob storage, file storage, queue storage, table storage, etc.

1. Azure Files

Azure Files provides cloud file sharing access that can be accessed anytime over the internet via the SMB or NFS protocols and is used for hosting files and folders in the cloud. It is best to use when you want to move to cloud applications without changing the earlier versions or the designs of apps already in use. It is also useful for storing changes that can be accessed at any time on your laptop or PCs.

2. Azure Blobs

It is an Azure object storage solution and provides a storage account to store a petabyte of unstructured data. It also supports the streaming of audio and video on the internet, builds a data lake, and supports the enterprise to perform big data analytics. Blob storage is used for storing binary large objects such as images, videos, or text files and documents.

3. Azure Elastic SAN (Storage Area Network)

It provides a combined solution to the businesses with regards to deploying, managing, and scaling the storage area network to the hardware as well as the software used, and offers syncing in the cloud.

4. Azure Disks

It is used for the continuous storing and accessing of its attached VHD (Virtual Hard Disks) and cannot be accessed from any other laptop or PC to which this VHD is not attached.

5. Azure Queues

Azure Queue storage is used for communication through messaging between services of up to 64 KB, which needs to remain active.

6. Azure Table

Azure table storage is used for storing non-relational and structured NoSQL data in the cloud. It is best for storing databases such as web applications or device information.

7. Azure NetApp Files

It provides easily accessible and enterprise-level Network Attached Storage (NAS) services that require high data management. It is best for migrating to the cloud from difficult-to-manage databases and helps in storing a wide range of applications with no need to change the code.

Azure Storage Costing Models

Azure Storage offers businesses three cost-effective models: pay-as-you-go, subscription-based, and reserved capacity.

1. With the pay-as-you-go model, businesses are charged based on storage usage and transactions.
2. With the subscription-based model, businesses can commit to a certain amount of storage each month and pay a discounted rate.
3. With the reserved capacity model, businesses can purchase a fixed amount of storage over an extended period at a discounted rate.

Ways to optimise costs for businesses using Azure Storage

1. Use the Azure Advisor services

Azure Advisor, which is free to use, will help you identify idle resources in your organization, such as virtual machines, which are the digital versions of physical laptops, PCs, and other resources. It will also provide recommendations on which resources to close and how much savings they provide.

2. Microsoft Cost Management

It helps in monitoring, allocating resources, and increasing the efficiency of cloud spending in your business by focusing on visibility and accountability.

3. Make use of free Azure services

Azure offers free services to users for the first 12 months after opening an account, such as Azure container registry, Azure archive storage, Azure managed disks, and so on. It also provides more than 55 services that are always free to use, such as Azure security centres, Azure data factories, etc.

4. Use the Azure calculator

There are two types of Azure calculators to estimate the cost of selecting the services: the Azure Storage Pricing calculator, which is used to calculate the estimated hourly or monthly costs, and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, which is used to estimate the cost savings you can achieve by moving your cloud workloads to Azure.

5. Discount offers

By selecting the pay-as-you-go Azure storage pricing , you can get a discount of up to 72% for a prepaid payment for the one-to-three-year duration.

6. Azure Hybrid benefits

It provides the licensing benefits to the business and is a cost-saving feature when you decide to move to Azure, and you can easily bring on your in-house Windows Server and SQL Server licenses.

Benefits of using Azure Storage Solutions

1. High Durability

It has high durability, as the data is safe and can be duplicated across data centres or regions in case of hardware failures or outages. Disaster recovery helps protect data from unexpected events such as natural disasters, human error, or malicious attacks.

2. High Security

The data stored in the system is secured and encrypted which is handled by experts. It also gives the account owner the ability to grant controlled access to data to their employees and external stakeholders.

3. Easily Scalable

The services provided by Azure Storage are easily scalable and customized based on the user's needs at their location, such as storage and bandwidth. Automated tiering allows businesses to store data in different tiers based on usage and access patterns.

4. Improves Productivity

Azure Services will provide all hardware maintenance and update services to its users, reducing the amount of time employees spend on maintenance and allowing them to focus more on the core operations of the business.

5. Easily Accessible

The data stored in the Azure Storage container is easily accessible over the internet at any place and at any time. Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer and Azure portal provides visual solutions for working on data. The client libraries provided in various languages are Java, Python, PHP, etc.

6. Maintains Continuity

It helps the businesses in maintaining the continuity for the work that requires an uninterrupted cloud infrastructure. Azure Storage solutions also provide businesses with features that make it easy to manage their data. Serverless computers allow businesses to run tasks without worrying about configuring and managing servers.

7. Flexible pricing models

The flexible pricing models of Azure help businesses spend within their monthly budgets for operating expenses and on a pay-per-use basis.

8. Sustainability

It helps businesses in moving to the sustainable way of storing the data and reduces the usage of hardware devices such as CDs, pen drives, etc. to store the data.

9. Cost Optimization

It helps businesses achieve cost optimization by taking advantage of the Azure cloud storage services, which offer free services and other managed services through Azure Advisor.

Conclusion

Therefore, Azure Storage solutions are best for organisations and companies of all sizes, as they offer a reliable, cost-effective way to store and archive data. With its scalability, features, and security measures, businesses can rest assured that their data is safe and secure while being able to access it anytime and anywhere.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a container in Azure storage?

Azure storage containers are available in Azure blob storage, which is like a directory. It is stored in an unlimited manner in the Azure storage account and includes the blobs. The name of the container should be 3 to 63 characters long and start with a letter or numerical character.

What is Azure storage?

Azure Storage is the cloud-based application to store different types of data on different types of solutions such as blobs, files, tables, queues, discs, etc.

What is Azure object storage?

Azure object storage is Microsoft's cloud solution. The users can access these objects in blob storage from anywhere over the internet via the Rest API.