Creating a Storage Account in Microsoft Azure
Tags: azure, devops, cloudstorage, microsoft
Published: 2024-07-03 20:40:38

A fundamental component of many Azure solutions is storage. Azure Storage Accounts provide highly durable and scalable storage for a variety of data objects, including blobs, files, tables, and queues. In this blog post, we'll walk through deploying a basic Storage Account in Azure, ensuring it meets some baseline security best practices.

**Why Create a Storage Account?**

Storage Accounts are the backbone for many Azure services. You can leverage them for:

* **Static website hosting:** Store your website's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files in blob storage.
* **Cloud applications:** Store application data, user uploads, and other assets.
* **Backup and archive:** Securely store backups of your on-premises data.
* **Big data analytics:** Store large datasets for processing with Azure Databricks or other analytics tools.

**Deployment with Security in Mind**

While this guide focuses on a basic deployment, it incorporates a few key security considerations:

* **Secure transfer:** We'll enable encryption for data transferred to and from the Storage Account.
* **Access restrictions:** While public access allows for easy demonstration purposes, we'll discuss disabling it for production environments.

### Steps to Deploy a Storage Account:

Now, let's get started with deployment!

1. **Locate the Storage Account:** 
    * In the Azure portal, navigate to the **Storage Accounts** section in **Azure Services**. Alternatively, search for "Storage Account" in the search bar.

    ![Locating Storage Account](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4rwfg1rtc4mrwafeuy6l.jpg)

2. **Create Storage Account:**
    * Click **Create Storage Account**.

    ![Creating Storage Accountt](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/aglggnucczm1fnit6gpk.jpg)

3. **Configure Settings:**
   - **Resource Group:** Choose an existing resource group or create a new one to organize your Azure resources.
     ![Create Resource Group](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/iww6j8w4kg8r8o81445z.jpg)
   - **Storage Account name:** Provide a unique globally identifiable name (3-24 characters, lowercase letters and numbers).
   - **Location:** Select a region geographically close to your primary audience for optimal performance.
   - **Account tier:** Leave the defaults for this demonstration. More advanced configurations can be explored based on your specific needs.
   - **Review+Create:** Once satisfied with your selections, click "Review+Create" to validate and deploy the Storage Account.
![Configuring Storage Account](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ppmo2ac13l56uqzjto85.jpg)
4. **Access Redundancy (Optional):**
    * By default, Azure Storage offers redundancy options to protect your data from hardware failures.  For this demonstration, we'll leave redundancy settings at the default. However, in production environments, consider utilizing a more robust redundancy option like Geo-redundant Storage (GRS) for optimal data protection.

    ![Accessing Redundancy Settings](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/be0hzklrvylulomrv732.jpg)

    ![Configuring Redundancy](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/noa914zqak2dwxrnmjns.jpg)

5. **Enable Secure Transfer:**
    * In the left menu, navigate to **Settings** > **Configuration**.
![Locating Configuration](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/bpxsmkda8zo0ir3z34je.jpg)
    * Locate **Secure transfer required** and ensure it's set to **Enabled**. This enforces encryption for all data transfers.
    * Choose a TLS version (e.g., 1.2) for the encryption protocol. 
    * **Save** your changes.

![Changing the Configurations](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/0ta3t8yp3scb7pknzxb4.jpg)

**Important Note:** Public access to the Storage Account is enabled for demonstration purposes only. In production environments, disable public access and implement more granular access controls using Azure Active Directory (AAD) for authorized users and applications.


![Locating Networking](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/vovx01f5dl4w8ikkf1sd.jpg)


![Configuring the Network](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/77jz2vxfxg03s6sya56t.jpg)

**Cleaning Up:**

Once you've finished exploring your Storage Account, remember to delete it to avoid unnecessary charges.  

This guide provides a foundational understanding of deploying a Storage Account in Azure with a focus on secure data transfer. Remember to adapt security configurations based on your specific use case!