Microsoft has been at the forefront of breakthrough AI solutions, empowering end customers, developers and IT professionals in the cloud while accelerating enterprise migrations to Azure. Azure Storage has evolved to power Microsoft’s AI and enterprise cloud development on board with innovations in platform infrastructure, product offerings, and workload integration.
Last January, we shared our 2023 Reflection and 2024 Outlook – and what a year it was! Microsoft has been at the forefront of breakthrough AI solutions, empowering end customers, developers and IT professionals in the cloud while accelerating enterprise migrations to Azure. Azure Storage has evolved to power Microsoft’s AI and enterprise cloud development on board with innovations in platform infrastructure, product offerings, and workload integration. Notable highlights from 2024:
- Azure Storage, a file system for Azure, enabled model training with exabytes of data and supervisory inference/AI applications for startups and enterprises.
- Premium SSDs V2, our general block storage, continued to grow double digit mum with expanded integration for new workloads like Epic and Oracle.
- Azure Elastic SAN, the industry’s only cloud-native offering, grew more than 10x within months of general availability, highlighting strong customer interest in moving from on-prem SAN to the cloud.
- Azure Container Storage, our new Kubernetes storage management solution, simplifies the development of cloud-native applications with a unified experience for all storage support options from transient disks to Azure disks.
As we enter 2025, our focus remains on our customers, with a vision to provide an intelligent data platform that maximizes the value of their data. We measure our success by the success of our customers and will continue to develop strong foundations and innovate for the benefit of customers and partners. We extend our sincere thanks to our customers and partners for their trust and cooperation and guide us to achieve more together.
Foundations for innovation
Under Microsoft’s Secured Future (SFI) initiatives, we’ve strengthened security across multiple categories—secondary by default, design, and operations—resulting in new platform improvements in identity and secret protection, network security, engineering systems security, monitoring, and secure design and secure design Reviews. We’ve also introduced customer-facing capabilities for security and data protection, including Microsoft Defender for storage, interest policy support (in preview), network security perimeter (in preview), and TLS 1.3 BLOB support. In 2025, we have plans to expand our secure security by default across multiple offerings, leveraging identity-based authentication and dissuading anonymous access.
Our investments in platform resiliency focus on proactive mitigation of the impactful customer resulting in predictive analytics. In the second half of 2024, we achieved a 52% reduction in high-impact incidents compared to 2023. Multi-volume snapshots for premium V2/Ultra SSDs and planned failover for blobs and files (in preview). In 2025, we will leverage AI and create automation to further increase failure prediction and detection, reducing both the incidence and recovery time of high-impact incidents; and empower customers with richer insights to monitor workload health signals for active mitigation.
Innovation for AI and emerging workloads
From powering cutting-edge AI solutions to driving seamless cloud experiences, storage innovation has become the backbone of technological advancement. But how do organizations stay ahead in this rapidly evolving landscape? The answer lies Focused innovation—Pargeted Advancements that transform the way we manage, access and use data.
Accelerating AI innovation with differentiated capacity
In 2024, we progressed in collaboration with OpenAI, with Azure Storage serving as the foundation for the AI lifecycle. At Ignite, we demonstrated how OpenAI leveraged Azure Blob storage throughout the lifecycle, from ingesting huge datasets for model training to enabling seamless data management and expansion without increasing operational complexity. Such success is made possible with Blob storage accounts that provide highly scalable throughput to avoid performance bottlenecks and simplify infrastructure. More of these capabilities we have developed in collaboration with AI-shopment customers such as OpenAI Data processing.
We are working on an exciting innovation that will seamlessly connect unstructured data with Azure AI Services and solutions from other AI companies where that data rests on-premise, in other clouds or in Azure. Building Multimodal Enterprise AI Applications Demands to access vast amounts of unregistered data, but enabling secure and well-controlled access to critical enterprise data across Cloud and On-Prémises Maldings is a major challenge for customers. This emerging solution will address the challenge by securely connecting your data to Azure AI Services, such as Azure AI Foundry and Azure Machine Learning, through their deep integration with Azure Blob – without the need for data migration or copying. By accelerating access to AI, reducing time to insight, and enabling the logical unification of data from multiple sources, this solution paves the way for transformational advances in enterprise AI. With robust management powered by tools like Azure RBAC, it gives you complete control over your data assets. A limited preview of this solution will be available soon, with general availability planned for 2025.
Focused innovation for emerging workloads
As the Cloud-S-ST approach becomes the default among startups and enterprises, we are seeing the emergence of new data-centric workloads related to AI training, security scanning built on stateful containers. Responding to the growing demand for container-secured storage, we introduced azure container storage, which offers a range of storage options through a native Kubernetes interface with support for new block storage such as ephemeral disks and elastic SANs. This is especially beneficial for workloads hosted on virtual machines (VMS) with graphics processing units (GPUs), where terabytes of local NVME can accelerate model training and inference. Additionally, developers don’t have to choose between durability and speed for transient drives. Azure Container Storage offers replication with flexible options, high resiliency within or across zones, and the best performance on the market. In 2025, we will strengthen integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by streamlining the installation experience and improving cost-effectiveness with general availability support for Elastic SAN.
Optimization for mission critical workloads
We continue to optimize the experience for running mission-critical workloads across our product portfolio. Braght’s Elastic SAN on the market, optimized for cost-performance at scale and seamless on-premise SAN Migration to Azure. With the general availability of Azure VMware Solution Integration, customers can use it not only for VMs and containers, but also as a native VMware data slice. We recently released SLA 99.99% support, Instant Snapshot (preview) with Azure Backup (preview) and self-management capacity (preview). The thesis capabilities solidify Elastic SAN as the premier choice for enterprise storage at scale. Looking ahead, we focus on optimizing the boxes for database and bare metal usage, reduce access latency and improve IOPS Scalability, and promote BCDR support.
In parallel, we are developing our drive offerings to meet the growing needs of businesses. To help customers expand database performance during peak traffic, we introduced the MBV3 VM series and support up to 650,000 disk IOPS – more than a 50% increase. We’ve also enabled general availability for live changes to our premium SSD V2/Ultra Disk offering, simplifying storage expansion on demand. With added disk type conversion support, customers can upgrade to these latest SKUs in-place. In the coming year, we’re landing more enhancements to V2/Ultra premium SSDs, which included automated disaster recovery through Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and Azure Migrate Integration.
Azure NetAP Files (ANF) brings the power of NetApp Ontap to the cloud as a native Azure service, offering broad protocol compatibility and sub-millisecond LTENCE. General release large volumes, scaling from 50 Tib to 2 PIB with over 700,000 IOPS and 12.5 GIBPS throughput, ANF to handle mission critical workloads in sectors such as electronic design automation and high performance computing (HPC). We will continue to optimize cost-effectiveness and enable integration with Azure AI services.
Azure Files offers fully managed file sharing for hybrid, lift-and-shift, and cloud-native applications. To bring you the benefits of Pay-As-You-Go As You-Go pricing while being predictable costs, we’ve introduced a new V2 delivery model to standard files. You can independently scale size, IOPS, and throughput according to workload requirements, starting at 32 GIB. In 2025, we are focused on easing the lifting and shifting of workloads with simplified management and seamless data migration, while enabling cloud-native use cases with integrated identity and increased performance.
Leadership with our partner ecosystem
We continue to strengthen our partner ecosystem to provide customers with choice and provide robust hybrid compliance management capabilities to high standards for quality and security. In 2024, we are working with partners to provide intelligent layer compression for Azure, Qumulo Native Azure V2 and Cloud native (Introducing an innovative price/performance level between Premium V2 and BLOB drives) and veeam cloud cloud vault built on Blob. We are proud to join the innovation and are excited to announce the upcoming releases in 2025:
- The Nasuni Data Service will enable our joint customers to access data stored in Nasuni Unifs through a BLOB API compatible gateway.
- Pure Storage will release a fully managed scalable service for block storage on Azure.
- Joint customers will bring Dell managed OneFS offerings and a Dell managed data domain.
Looking ahead with Azure storage
As we enter 2025, the horizon for storage innovation is more exciting than ever. With advances like A-driven optimization, sustainable infrastructure, and lightning-fast access speeds, we’re redefining what’s possible in Azure storage. Next year isn’t just about storing more—it’s about empowering businesses to achieve more with intelligent, scalable and future-proof storage solutions. Here’s to the year of turning data into possibility!
