Provide Storage for the IT Department Testing and Training

#azure #microsoft #cloudcomputing #tutorial

Businesses generate, use, and depend on the processing and storage of vast amounts of data, for daily operations and business continuity.

Varying data types often have different storage requirements.

A company may have to decide where and how to store certain data based on factors such as sensitivity, access frequency, expected life cycle, redundancy, cost implications, regulatory compliance, and many more.

Much like a container, a storage account in Azure is an excellent place to store data objects, as well as apply settings that implement identified data requirements.

Consider a use case from the Microsoft guided project:

'Provide storage for the IT department testing and training.'

Requirements: 'The IT department needs to prototype different storage scenarios and to train new personnel. The content isn’t important enough to back up and doesn’t need to be restored if the data is overwritten or removed.'

To fulfill these requirements, we must create a storage account and apply appropriate settings.

Here's the step by step process:

Step 1: Create a resource group.

In Azure, every project requires a resource group. Resource groups are a useful tool that helps you categorise your project resources.

Go to Azure portal, search for resource groups, select Resource groups in the drop down suggestions.

Note: The + Create a resource button provides a navigation option to the Search bar, but it links to marketplace where products from third party vendors are also listed. Making use of the search bar takes you to Microsofts own products, which is our focus.

Click the + Create button.

In the Basics tab, give the resource group a name and select region.

Hit Review and Create, then Create. Wait for notice of successful resource group deployment.

Step 2: Create a Storage Account.

In the search bar, type storage accounts and select Storage accounts from the drop down suggestions.

Click the + Create button.

In the Basics tab, select resource group earlier created and give the storage account a name. Note that a storage account name must be globally unique in Azure.

Set Performance to Standard (cheaper than the premium option), then click Review + create

Wait for deployment completion, then hit Go to resource

Step 3: Configure Storage Account Settings per Requirements

Recall: 'The content isn’t important enough to back up and doesn’t need to be restored if the data is overwritten or removed.'

Bearing these policies in mind, we have to confure cost minimal settings.

Redundancy:

On the left pane, select Data management > Redundancy, select Locally-redundant storage (LRS), then Save

A locally-redundant storage costs less to implement compared to geo-redundant storage. In the case, data is replicated for redundancy, but within same data center.

Wait for redundancy change completion.

Notice a single location is shown after page refresh (you may have to refresh page)

Network Access:

A. Allow only secure connections to storage account - On the left pane, select Settings > Configuration, enable Secure transfer required

B. Disallow connections until access to storage account is needed - Disable Allow storage account key access.

C. Set storage account to use Transport Layer Security version 1.2 at the minimum - Set Minimal TLS version to Version 1.2.

D. Finally, to allow connections to the storage account from all networks - Go to Security + networking in the left pane, select the Networking, set Public network access to Enabled from all networks