Azure Blob Storage Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure Blob Storage for various organisational needs, including storing documents, claim bills, backups, media, and archives. It's very convenient to use, easily accessible, and secure. These use cases are used by our various departments, making it a one-stop solution for most of our needs. As our business grows, we will have more such use cases in the future that can leverage Azure Blob storage.

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure Blob storage works really well with the Azure ecosystem like Azure entra for security, Azure data lake for analytics. Its a good solution for storing unstructured data and and can be accessed over the web or mobile. However, its not appropriate for migrating few of the legacy applications that works on a traditional file system.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as file storage for our DMS solution, and the Terraform automation needs a container as state storage. So to speak, it addresses the crucial need for a reliable, cost-efficient, and reasonably fast storage. Both use cases have different needs (e.g., soft-delete options and locks to avoid conflicting changes), which are covered in the feature scope.

Likelihood to Recommend

In Azure, it is the storage to use, and in my view, the Blob Storage offers more, or finer-grained configuration options, than S3. So my recommendation would be to check in detail what is offered. As the Blob Storage is more or less a Microsoft exclusive product, the "interoperability" is more limited than, for example, with S3. The S3 is more widely adopted, and if you cannot exclude a migration scenario from one cloud provider to another, additional effort is needed.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's used to store mostly images uploaded in an ERP software, this software use those files to generate reports as evidence/proof of work. Also we integrate Azure Blob Storage with our kubernetes cluster to persist data used by our pods/containers. Also we upload some internal backups to Azure Blob Storage to serve as a secondary backup location.

Likelihood to Recommend

As an excellent alternative to Amazon S3 storage solution to use, it has worked excellent and easy to implement with their SDKS as Java or python

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Blob storage to share large files and public marketing material. Using blob storage is very easy; the access settings allow you to make files public so that anyone with the URL can access them, or they can be set as private and restricted. Using Blob storage allows us to keep control of the files at the source rather than leaving our estate as with external file-sharing systems. Using a vanity URL allows the link to look more user-friendly/professional.

Likelihood to Recommend

Blob storage is well suited to hosting/sharing zipped files rather than several smaller files, as folder enumeration/listing is not supported. Files uploaded are case-sensitive, so users need to be educated on the correct naming convention format if they are delegating the file-sharing process outside of IT.

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.

It works well for storing static files and as a place to store/host attachments uploaded by users in the cloud.

It also is covered by the Microsoft Defender security product also offered by Azure which provides additional security including scanning for malware.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.