Azure Storage has evolved to bolster the improvement of Microsoft AI and endeavor unreality onboarding with aggregate innovations.

Last January, we shared our reflection of 2023 and outlook for 2024—and what a twelvemonth it has been! Microsoft has been astatine the forefront of groundbreaking AI solutions, empowering extremity customers, developers and IT Professionals successful the unreality portion accelerating endeavor migrations to Azure. Azure Storage has evolved to bolster the improvement of Microsoft AI and endeavor unreality onboarding with innovations successful level infrastructure, merchandise offerings, and workload integration. A fewer notable highlights from 2024:

• Azure Storage, the filesystem for AI connected Azure, enabled exemplary grooming with exabytes of information and supported inferencing/AI applications for startups and enterprises. 
• Premium SSD v2 disks, our general-purpose artifact storage, continued to turn treble digit MoM, with expanded integration for caller workloads similar Epic and Oracle. 
• Azure Elastic SAN, the industry’s lone unreality autochthonal SAN offering, grew by much than 10 times wrong fewer months of wide availability, highlighting beardown lawsuit interests to modulation from on-prem SAN to cloud.
• Azure Container Storage, our caller Kubernetes retention absorption solution, simplifies unreality autochthonal app improvement with a unified acquisition for each backing retention options from ephemeral disks to Azure Disks.

As we participate 2025, our absorption remains connected our customers, with a imaginativeness to supply an intelligent information level that maximizes the worth of their data. We measurement our occurrence by our customers’ occurrence and volition proceed to make beardown fundamentals and innovations to payment our customers and partners. We widen a heartfelt convey you to our customers and partners for their spot and collaboration, driving america to execute much together.

Fundamentals for Innovation

Under Microsoft’s Secured Future (SFI) initiatives, we’ve strengthened information crossed aggregate categories—security by default, design, and operations—resulting successful important level improvements successful individuality and concealed protection, web security, engineering systems security, monitoring, and unafraid plan review. We besides introduced customer-facing capabilities for information and information protection, including Microsoft Defender enactment for Storage, Purview extortion policies support (in preview), Network Security Perimeter (in preview), and TLS 1.3 Blob support. We person plans successful 2025 to grow our unafraid by default posture crossed assorted offerings, with policies leveraging identity-based authentication and discouraging anonymous access.

Our investments successful level resiliency absorption connected proactive mitigation of impactful lawsuit issues via predictive analysis. We achieved 52% simplification successful precocious interaction incidents successful the 2nd fractional of 2024 compared to 2023. In parallel, we proceed to empower customers successful gathering highly disposable (HA) solutions and enhancing our concern continuity and catastrophe betterment (BCDR) enactment via capabilities similar multi-volume snapshots for Premium SSD v2/Ultra Disks, and planned failover for Blobs and Files (in preview). In 2025, we volition leverage AI and physique automation to further heighten nonaccomplishment prediction and detection, reducing some the occurrence and betterment clip of precocious interaction incidents; and empower customers with richer insights to way workload wellness signals for proactive mitigation.

Innovations for AI and emerging workloads

From powering cutting-edge AI solutions to driving seamless unreality experiences, retention innovation has go the backbone of technological progress. But however bash organizations enactment up successful this rapidly evolving landscape? The reply lies successful focused innovations—targeted advancements that alteration however we manage, access, and utilize data.

Accelerating AI innovation with differentiated capabilities

In 2024, we precocious ample connection exemplary improvement successful collaboration with OpenAI, with Azure Storage serving arsenic the instauration for the AI lifecycle. At Ignite, we showcased however OpenAI leveraged Azure Blob Storage passim the lifecycle, from ingesting immense datasets for exemplary grooming to enabling seamless information absorption and enlargement without expanding operational complexity. Such accomplishment is made imaginable with Blob Storage scaled accounts providing highly scalable throughput to forestall show bottlenecks and simplify infrastructure. More of these capabilities that we person developed successful collaboration with AI-scale customers specified arsenic OpenAI volition travel successful 2025. We volition besides bring these advancements into Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and connection much intelligent capabilities connected ADLS targeting AI workloads for much businesslike information processing.

We’re moving connected an breathtaking innovation that volition seamlessly link unstructured information with Azure AI services and different companies’ AI solutions, whether that information resides on-premises, successful different clouds, oregon wrong Azure. Building multi-modal endeavor AI applications requires entree to immense amounts of unstructured information but enabling unafraid and well-governed entree to captious endeavor information crossed unreality and on-premises environments is simply a large situation for customers. This emerging solution volition tackle the situation by securely connecting your information with Azure AI services similar Azure AI Foundry, and Azure Machine Learning, done their heavy integration with Azure Blob—without the request for information migration oregon copying. By accelerating entree to AI, reducing clip to insight, and enabling the logical unification of information from aggregate sources, this solution volition pave the mode for transformative advancements successful endeavor AI. With robust governance powered by tools similar Azure RBAC, it volition springiness you implicit power implicit your information estate. The limited preview of this solution volition beryllium disposable soon, with wide availability planned for 2025.

Focused innovations for emerging workloads

As the cloud-first attack becomes the default among startups and enterprises, we are witnessing the emergence of caller data-centric workloads related to AI training, information scanning built connected stateful containers. In effect to expanding request of retention catered for containers, we introduced Azure Container Storage, which offers a scope of retention options via the autochthonal Kubernetes interface, with enactment for caller artifact retention options similar ephemeral disks and Elastic SAN. This is particularly beneficial for workloads hosted connected virtual machines (VMs) with graphics processing units (GPUs), wherever terabytes of section NVMe tin accelerate exemplary grooming and inferencing. Moreover, developers nary longer request to take betwixt resiliency and velocity for ephemeral disks. Azure Container Storage offers replication with flexible options, ensuring precocious resiliency wrong oregon crossed zones and champion show connected the market. In 2025, we volition heighten integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by streamlining the installation acquisition and amended cost-efficiency with wide availability enactment for Elastic SAN. 

Optimizations for ngo captious workloads

We proceed to optimize the acquisition for moving mission-critical workloads crossed our merchandise portfolio. We brought to the market—Azure Elastic SAN, optimized for price-performance astatine standard and seamless on-premises SAN migration to Azure. With the general availability of Azure VMware Solution integration, customers tin leverage it not lone for VMs and containers but besides arsenic a autochthonal VMware datastore. We precocious released 99.99% uptime SLA support, instant snapshot (in preview) with Azure Backup (in preview), and capableness auto-scaling (in preview). These capabilities solidify Elastic SAN arsenic a starring prime for endeavor retention astatine scale. Looking ahead, we are focusing connected optimization for database and bare-metal usage cases, reducing entree latency and improving IOPS scalability, and advancing BCDR support.

In parallel, we are advancing our Disk offerings to conscionable the increasing needs of enterprises. To assistance customers standard up database show during highest traffic, we introduced Mbv3 VM series, supporting up to 650,000 disk IOPS—more than a 50% increase. We besides enabled wide availability for live resizing connected our Premium SSD v2/Ultra Disk offerings, simplifying on-demand retention expansion. With the added enactment for disk benignant conversion, customers tin upgrade to these latest SKUs successful place. In the coming year, we are landing much improvements connected Premium SSD v2/Ultra Disks including automated catastrophe betterment via Azure Site Recovery (ASR), and Azure Migrate integration.

Azure NetApp Files (ANF) brings the spot of NetApp ONTAP to the unreality arsenic a autochthonal Azure service, offering wide protocol compatibility, and sub-millisecond latency. The wide availability merchandise of ample volumes, raising the standard from 50 TiB to 2 PiB with implicit 700,000 IOPS and 12.5 GiBps throughput, positions ANF to grip ngo captious workloads successful sectors similar Electronic Design Automation and high-performance computing (HPC). We volition proceed optimizing cost-efficiency and enabling integration with Azure AI services.

Azure Files offers afloat managed record shares for hybrid, lift-and-shift and unreality autochthonal applications. To bring you the benefits of pay-as-you-go pricing portion providing predictable costs, we introduced a caller provisioning model—Provisioned v2 connected Standard Files. You tin independently standard retired the size, IOPS, and throughput per workload requirements, starting from 32 GiB. In 2025, our absorption is to easiness assistance and displacement of workloads with simplified absorption and seamless information migration portion enabling unreality autochthonal usage cases with integrated identity, and enhanced performance.

Leading with our spouse ecosystem

We proceed to fortify our spouse ecosystem to supply customers with prime and present robust hybrid absorption capabilities adhering to precocious standards for prime and security. In 2024, we collaborated with partners successful delivering Komprise intelligent tiering for Azure and Veeam Data Cloud Vault built connected Blob. We pridefulness ourselves connected associated innovation and are excited to denote upcoming releases successful 2025:

• Nasuni Data Service volition let our associated customers to entree information stored successful Nasuni UniFS via a Blob API compatible gateway.
• Pure Storage volition merchandise a afloat managed scalable artifact retention work connected Azure.
• Dell volition bring Dell-Managed as-a-Service offerings of OneFS and Data Domain to our associated customers.

Looking up with Azure Storage

As we measurement into 2025, the skyline for retention innovation is much breathtaking than ever. With advancements similar AI-driven optimization, sustainable infrastructure, and lightning-fast entree speeds, we are redefining what’s imaginable successful Azure Storage. The twelvemonth up isn’t conscionable astir storing more—it’s astir empowering businesses to execute much with smarter, scalable, and future-ready retention solutions. Here’s to a twelvemonth of turning information into possibilities!