Azure Storage Discovery: Microsoft launches analysis service for cloud storage
Microsoft has officially launched Azure Storage Discovery. The service analyzes Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage and optimizes the booked storage.
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Microsoft has released Azure Storage Discovery as a generally available service. It is intended to provide companies with a central overview of their storage landscape in Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage in order to reduce costs, uncover security risks, and reveal long-term trends.
The service aggregates storage data in a central workspace and delivers initial analysis results after a few hours. 15 days of historical data are provided retroactively. In the standard tariff, companies can access up to 18 months of historical data to identify long-term trends. However, the analysis is limited to Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage – other storage types such as Azure Files are explicitly excluded.
"AI, please lower my storage costs"
A central feature is the integration of the AI assistant Copilot into Azure. IT managers can ask questions in natural language, for example about the development of storage capacity by region or about accounts with high costs. The system then generates suitable visualizations as diagrams or tables. Alternatively, pre-built dashboards are available in the Azure portal, which can be filtered by region, redundancy, or performance.
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The analysis should be able to differentiate between capacity development and object sizes, transaction patterns and data access, security configurations such as public access or missing encryption, redundancy settings and lifecycle management, as well as failed operations. If the service identifies unused or inefficiently configured storage, for example, it can be moved to cheaper storage tiers – thus optimizing the costs for Azure Storage.
For use, administrators must first create a Storage Discovery Workspace and select the desired subscriptions and resource groups. The analysis can be organized by business units or workloads. Prices are tiered, with a free basic tariff and paid options with extended functions. Azure Storage Discovery is available in the Azure portal under Storage Center > Data Management or in the Azure Marketplace. Further information can also be found in Microsoft's TechWiese announcement.
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