Azure Blob storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

Blob storage is ideal for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Blob Service Concepts

Blob storage exposes three resources: your storage account, the containers in the account, and the blobs in a container. The following diagram shows the relationship between these resources.

SkySync Connection

SkySync utilizes token-based authentication to establish a connection to an Azure Blob Storage Account.  A Blob storage Access Key will need to be provided in order to authenticate to the defined Azure Blob storage account.  A Blob storage account is a specialized storage account for storing your unstructured data as blobs (objects) in Azure Storage.  Blob storage accounts support only block and append blobs, and not page blobs.  Hot or Cool Access Tier attributes can be defined or modified as needed depending on frequent or in-frequent access to Blob objects.  All objects transferred from the SkySync platform to Azure Blob Storage will be stored within a specified container.  A container is similar to a folder in a file system. You can further organize blobs into virtual directories, and traverse them as you would a file system.

In addition to providing the ability to connect directly to Azure Blob Storage via the SkySync Azure Blob Storage Connector, the same connection is utilized during Office 365 content integration and migration projects.  When projects require transferring data to Office 365, SkySync establishes a connection to Azure Blob Storage in order to leverage the Office 365 Migration API.

“Introduction to object storage in Azure” Microsoft.com, Microsoft Corporation, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blobs-introduction. Accessed 31 August 2018