Microsoft’s Immutable storage for Azure Storage Blobs, now generally available

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Microsoft’s new “immutable storage” feature for Azure Blobs, is now generally available.

Financial Services organizations regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and others are required to retain business-related communications in a Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) or immutable state. This ensures that the data is non-erasable and non-modifiable for a specific retention interval. Healthcare, insurance, media, public safety, and legal services industries will also benefit a great deal from this feature.

Through configurable policies, users can only create and read Blobs, and not modify or delete them. There is no additional charge for using this feature. Immutable data is priced in the same way as mutable data.

Upgrades that accompany this feature are:

#1 Regulatory compliance

Immutable storage for Azure Blobs will help financial institutions and related industries to store data immutably. Microsoft will soon release a technical white paper with details on how the feature addresses regulatory requirements. Head over to the Azure Trust Center for detailed information about compliance certifications.

#2 Secure document retention

The immutable storage feature for Azure Blobs service ensures that data cannot be modified or deleted by any user- even with administrative privileges.

#3 Better Legal Hold

Users can now store sensitive information related to a litigation, criminal investigation, and more in a tamper-proof state for the desired duration.

#4 Time-based retention policy support

Users can set policies to store data immutably for a specified interval of time.

#5 Legal hold policy support

When users do not know the data retention time, they can set legal holds to store data until the legal hold is cleared.

#6 Support for all Blob tiers

WORM policies are independent of the Azure Blob Storage tier and will apply to all the tiers. Therefore, Customers can store their data in the most cost-optimized tier for their workloads immutably.

#7 Blob Container level configuration

Users can configure time-based retention policies and legal hold tags at the container level. Simple container level settings can create time-based retention policies, lock policies, extend retention intervals, set legal holds, clear legal holds etc.

17a-4, LLC, Commvault , HubStor,Archive2Azure are among the few Microsoft partners that support Azure Blob immutable storage. To know how to upgrade to this feature, head over to the Microsoft Blog