Last January, we shared our reflection of 2023 and outlook for 2024—and what a year it has been! Microsoft has been at the forefront of groundbreaking AI solutions, empowering end customers, developers and IT Professionals in the cloud while accelerating enterprise migrations to Azure. Azure Storage has evolved to bolster the evolution of Microsoft AI and enterprise cloud onboarding with innovations in platform infrastructure, product offerings, and workload integration. A few notable highlights from 2024:
- Azure Storage, the filesystem for AI on Azure, enabled model training with exabytes of data and supported inferencing/AI applications for startups and enterprises.
- Premium SSD v2 disks, our general-purpose block storage, continued to grow double digit MoM, with expanded integration for new workloads like Epic and Oracle.
- Azure Elastic SAN, the industry’s only cloud native SAN offering, grew by more than 10 times within few months of general availability, highlighting strong customer interests to transition from on-prem SAN to cloud.
- Azure Container Storage, our new Kubernetes storage management solution, simplifies cloud native app development with a unified experience for all backing storage options from ephemeral 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 our customers’ success and will continue to develop strong fundamentals and innovations to benefit our customers and partners. We extend a heartfelt thank you to our customers and partners for their trust and collaboration, driving us to achieve more together.
Fundamentals for Innovation
Under Microsoft’s Secured Future (SFI) initiatives, we’ve strengthened security across multiple categories—security by default, design, and operations—resulting in significant platform improvements in identity and secret protection, network security, engineering systems security, monitoring, and secure design review. We also introduced customer-facing capabilities for security and data protection, including Microsoft Defender support for Storage, Purview protection policies support (in preview), Network Security Perimeter (in preview), and TLS 1.3 Blob support. We have plans in 2025 to expand our secure by default posture across various offerings, with policies leveraging identity-based authentication and discouraging anonymous access.
Our investments in platform resiliency focus on proactive mitigation of impactful customer issues via predictive analysis. We achieved 52% reduction in high impact incidents in the second half of 2024 compared to 2023. In parallel, we continue to empower customers in building highly available (HA) solutions and enhancing our business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) support via capabilities like multi-volume snapshots for Premium SSD v2/Ultra Disks, and planned failover for Blobs and Files (in preview). In 2025, we will leverage AI and build automation to further enhance failure prediction and detection, reducing both the occurrence and recovery time of high impact incidents; and empower customers with richer insights to track workload health signals for proactive mitigation.
Innovations for AI and emerging workloads
From powering cutting-edge AI solutions to driving seamless cloud experiences, storage innovation has become the backbone of technological progress. But how do organizations stay ahead in this rapidly evolving landscape? The answer lies in focused innovations—targeted advancements that transform how we manage, access, and utilize data.
Accelerating AI innovation with differentiated capabilities
In 2024, we advanced large language model development in collaboration with OpenAI, with Azure Storage serving as the foundation for the AI lifecycle. At Ignite, we showcased how OpenAI leveraged Azure Blob Storage throughout the lifecycle, from ingesting vast datasets for model training to enabling seamless data management and expansion without increasing operational complexity. Such achievement is made possible with Blob Storage scaled accounts providing highly scalable throughput to prevent performance bottlenecks and simplify infrastructure. More of these capabilities that we have developed in collaboration with AI-scale customers such as OpenAI will come in 2025. We will also bring these advancements into Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and offer more intelligent capabilities on ADLS targeting AI workloads for more efficient data processing.
We’re working on an exciting innovation that will seamlessly connect unstructured data with Azure AI services and other companies’ AI solutions, whether that data resides on-premises, in other clouds, or within Azure. Building multi-modal enterprise AI applications requires access to vast amounts of unstructured data but enabling secure and well-governed access to critical enterprise data across cloud and on-premises environments is a major challenge for customers. This emerging solution will tackle the challenge by securely connecting your data with Azure AI services like 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 will pave the way for transformative advancements in enterprise AI. With robust governance powered by tools like Azure RBAC, it will give you complete control over your data estate. The limited preview of this solution will be available soon, with general availability planned for 2025.
Focused innovations for emerging workloads
As the cloud-first approach becomes the default among startups and enterprises, we are witnessing the emergence of new data-centric workloads related to AI training, security scanning built on stateful containers. In response to increasing demand of storage catered for containers, we introduced Azure Container Storage, which offers a range of storage options via the native Kubernetes interface, with support for new block storage options like ephemeral disks and Elastic SAN. 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 inferencing. Moreover, developers no longer need to choose between resiliency and speed for ephemeral disks. Azure Container Storage offers replication with flexible options, ensuring high resiliency within or across zones and best performance on the market. In 2025, we will enhance integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by streamlining the installation experience and improve cost-efficiency with general availability support for Elastic SAN.
Optimizations for mission critical workloads
We continue to optimize the experience for running mission-critical workloads across our product portfolio. We brought to the market—Azure Elastic SAN, optimized for price-performance at scale and seamless on-premises SAN migration to Azure. With the general availability of Azure VMware Solution integration, customers can leverage it not only for VMs and containers but also as a native VMware datastore. We recently released 99.99% uptime SLA support, instant snapshot (in preview) with Azure Backup (in preview), and capacity auto-scaling (in preview). These capabilities solidify Elastic SAN as a leading choice for enterprise storage at scale. Looking ahead, we are focusing on optimization for database and bare-metal use cases, reducing access latency and improving IOPS scalability, and advancing BCDR support.
In parallel, we are advancing our Disk offerings to meet the growing needs of enterprises. To help customers scale up database performance during peak traffic, we introduced Mbv3 VM series, supporting up to 650,000 disk IOPS—more than a 50% increase. We also enabled general availability for live resizing on our Premium SSD v2/Ultra Disk offerings, simplifying on-demand storage expansion. With the added support for disk type conversion, customers can upgrade to these latest SKUs in place. In the coming year, we are landing more improvements on Premium SSD v2/Ultra Disks including automated disaster recovery via Azure Site Recovery (ASR), and Azure Migrate integration.
Azure NetApp Files (ANF) brings the strength of NetApp ONTAP to the cloud as a native Azure service, offering broad protocol compatibility, and sub-millisecond latency. The general availability release of large volumes, raising the scale from 50 TiB to 2 PiB with over 700,000 IOPS and 12.5 GiBps throughput, positions ANF to handle mission critical workloads in sectors like Electronic Design Automation and high-performance computing (HPC). We will continue optimizing cost-efficiency and enabling integration with Azure AI services.
Azure Files offers fully managed file shares for hybrid, lift-and-shift and cloud native applications. To bring you the benefits of pay-as-you-go pricing while providing predictable costs, we introduced a new provisioning model—Provisioned v2 on Standard Files. You can independently scale out the size, IOPS, and throughput per workload requirements, starting from 32 GiB. In 2025, our focus is to ease lift and shift of workloads with simplified management and seamless data migration while enabling cloud native use cases with integrated identity, and enhanced performance.
Leading with our partner ecosystem
We continue to strengthen our partner ecosystem to provide customers with choice and deliver robust hybrid management capabilities adhering to high standards for quality and security. In 2024, we collaborated with partners in delivering Komprise intelligent tiering for Azure and Veeam Data Cloud Vault built on Blob. We pride ourselves on joint innovation and are excited to announce upcoming releases in 2025:
- Nasuni Data Service will allow our joint customers to access data stored in Nasuni UniFS via a Blob API compatible gateway.
- Pure Storage will release a fully managed scalable block storage service on Azure.
- Dell will bring Dell-Managed as-a-Service offerings of OneFS and Data Domain to our joint customers.
Looking ahead with Azure Storage
As we step into 2025, the horizon for storage innovation is more exciting than ever. With advancements like AI-driven optimization, sustainable infrastructure, and lightning-fast access speeds, we are redefining what’s possible in Azure Storage. The year ahead isn’t just about storing more—it’s about empowering businesses to achieve more with smarter, scalable, and future-ready storage solutions. Here’s to a year of turning data into possibilities!
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