Azure Storage Actions: Effortless Data Management Now Live
Microsoft is excited to introduce the general availability of Azure Storage Actions, a fully managed solution designed to revolutionise how organisations automate data management for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage.
We’re delighted to share that Azure Storage Actions is now generally available. This all-inclusive platform is built to enhance the way businesses automate and orchestrate their data management routines within Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage environments.
Modern businesses generate and store ever-expanding quantities of data, often resulting in billions of objects scattered across regions. This widespread data growth—commonly known as data sprawl—complicates consistent data governance, increasing the challenges of securing, protecting, and managing costs related to your organisation’s information. Standardising and simplifying data management processes becomes even more crucial, so your IT teams can remain focused on strategic projects that drive value, instead of getting bogged down with repetitive maintenance work.
Currently, data management often requires a mix of different tools and custom scripts for searching, filtering, and operating upon objects, with approaches varying depending on the dataset’s size and purpose. Teams may use analytic queries, write intricate scripts, or leverage event triggers and feeds. Reliable data processing is further complicated by the need to validate against test datasets and coordinate secure, scalable access to production environments across regions. This complexity grows for new datasets with similar needs. Azure Storage Actions was specifically crafted to place control back in your hands—helping you unify and simplify data management at scale across your organisation.
Enhance Data Management with Azure Storage Actions
Azure Storage Actions lets you effortlessly construct sophisticated tasks that act on objects according to their properties, all without any programming required. You’re able to define the operations, safely preview results using live production data, and then roll out the tasks—whether as one-off or repeating automations—across thousands of accounts, without provisioning or maintaining any extra resources. Monitor everything centrally with intuitive dashboards and detailed reporting. After validation, your task templates become reusable: simply apply them to any dataset with matching requirements, anywhere across your Azure estate. Key benefits include:
Simplify management
Automatically scan your data repository for items that meet your criteria, performing reliable actions with robust error-handling built in.
Save time and effort
Say goodbye to weeks of coding and testing. Azure Storage Actions provides a scalable, serverless workflow that adapts to your data volumes and ensures critical workloads are prioritised.
Ensure uniformity
Reuse previously validated task definitions consistently across different datasets and regions, so your data management always meets internal standards.
Automated insights
Stay focused on outcomes, not operations. Use visual dashboards to track summaries and drill down into comprehensive logs of each task’s execution.
Supported workflows now include lifecycle and retention management, cost optimisation, automated data protection, metadata and tag consistency, archive restores, and more—ensuring you stay ahead as new data management scenarios emerge.
Since the initial public preview, Azure Storage Actions has rapidly grown in popularity, demonstrating a clear need for more accessible, scalable and repeatable approaches to cloud data management. Start-ups and household-name enterprises alike have leveraged the service for both recurring maintenance and special-case data management. A few highlight cases from the preview period follow below.
Streamlined Backup Data Management
PointsBet, when deploying their suite of data protection services, found themselves managing petabytes of backup snapshots and transaction logs—each created hourly, daily, and weekly—across dozens of storage accounts in several regions. Data items were differentiated using advanced naming conventions and tagged with metadata for environment and purpose. Their policies varied: for example, critical production snapshots had to be stored for up to a decade, while other items were scheduled for earlier deletion or archiving. Maintaining a complex matrix of automation scripts to address each policy took significant engineering time and demanded constant review and scaling, especially as data volumes rocketed.
Azure Storage Actions enabled PointsBet to consolidate these different rules into a single, adaptable task. Flexible condition checks assured them that objects would be appropriately archived or deleted, and a single scheduled task kept every storage account up to date—even as data volumes soared. This approach cut their development cycles by weeks, eliminated perpetual resource maintenance, and brought newfound reliability and transparency to their backup workflows.
We successfully completed the POC for Azure Storage Actions and are excited to unlock its full potential with GA. Storage Actions helped us get to a one-stop solution for backup management. It helps us tag metadata, automate blob lifecycle management, and archive to comply with our retention policy. We can eliminate multiple resource-heavy automation runbooks, and handle vast numbers of blobs effortlessly, moving them around as needed. We can drive down our storage costs, as well as streamline our entire backup process —making it scalable and consistent.
—Pooja Goel, Data Services Engineer, at PointsBet
Integrated Data Governance for Business Applications
Another organisation, offering analytics for environmental non-profits, requires input data to be held for 90 days by default, with some projects necessitating longer retention (for compliance or research). With Azure Storage Actions, retention policies are now enforced automatically using container metadata. Whenever a non-profit upgrades for extended storage—perhaps due to extended research needs—metadata values on their data containers are directly amended to reflect their purchase, setting the appropriate retention dates and durations. Azure Storage Actions examines this metadata and applies necessary immutability, ensuring records cannot be altered or deleted before expiry.
How to Troubleshoot Common Azure Storage Actions Issues
If you encounter issues while setting up or running Azure Storage Actions, follow these troubleshooting steps:
- Permissions: Ensure the managed identity or user has the necessary RBAC roles for the storage accounts and containers being managed.
- Task Validation Errors: Double-check filter conditions and test your task definition against a trial set to confirm your logic matches your intended results.
- Performance Concerns: If your tasks are running slower than expected, check for high concurrency settings or verify that large-scale data operations are partitioned appropriately.
- Monitoring and Logs: Use the Azure Storage Actions dashboard for execution summaries. For detailed problem analysis, drill into task reports and logs to identify failed actions or misconfigured rules.
- Network Access: Confirm that virtual network and firewall settings permit Azure Storage Actions to access the relevant storage accounts, especially when accounts are locked down for security.
For more support, browse the Azure Storage Actions documentation or search Microsoft Learn for articles related to your scenario.
By setting up specific rules, it’s possible to retain only the data required for regulatory compliance while automatically removing content once its retention window is over. Using Storage Actions for this purpose dramatically simplified how teams connect their transaction systems with data lifecycle and governance solutions. It also reduced the number of resources to oversee and resulted in better compliance outcomes.
How to Restore Selected Blobs from Archive at Scale
A government agency in the United States tax and revenue sector faced the urgent task of recovering around 600 million records from billions stored in an archive after suddenly losing access. With Azure Storage Actions, they rapidly scanned their storage, identifying and restoring specific blob versions using patterns and date filters. Thanks to the user-friendly interface and live condition preview, they could verify their selections on the fly and restore exactly what was needed in just a few hours. This targeted method was far more efficient—avoiding the need for custom coding to sift through countless blobs or complicated infrastructure rollouts—meaning minimal disruption and a speedy response in a critical moment.
Here are some customer insights on using Storage Actions:
Azure Storage Actions has completely changed how we manage storage, making migrations quicker and streamlining everyday operations for our clients. The efficiency improvements in data management have been significant.
—Charbel Nemnom, Senior Architect Azure, itnetX (Switzerland) AG
In today’s world, strong data governance is vital for clients who need to maintain compliance and protect data quality. Azure Storage Actions lets users set up retention and expiry policies via a no-code interface, making it much quicker to implement and maintain policies over large datasets. This approach helps streamline governance and keeps data on track with company rules, even as environments grow more complex.
—Viral Patel, Principal Platform Consultant, Mesh-AI
With general availability, Azure Storage Actions can now help manage large-scale storage environments reliably. Improve your organisation’s data handling by following the Quickstart guide or logging into the Azure portal. Storage Actions can be found in the Azure Marketplace or directly in the Data Management section of your storage account menu. For more detail, have a look at our official documentation. Pricing can be found on the product page.
We always seek customer feedback to keep enhancing our service. Let us know which data management tasks you’d like automated, and stay tuned for upcoming features—such as new operations, refined conditional logic, and smoother workflow tools.
How to Troubleshoot Common Azure Storage Actions Issues
- Issue: Unable to find restored blobs
Solution: Double-check your filters and wildcards in the condition setup. Use the preview function to confirm your selection before running the action. - Issue: Restores are taking too long
Solution: Review your batch sizes and timing. For very large workloads, consider breaking the tasks into smaller logical sets for faster completion. - Issue: Storage Actions not visible
Solution: Ensure your storage account type supports Azure Storage Actions. Look for “Data Management” in the left menu—if it’s missing, check your subscription level and region support.
