What’s so special about Azure Archive Storage

• Lowest‑priced Azure storage tier for long‑term retention: Archive Storage enables organizations to store terabytes or petabytes of data for only a fraction of the cost of hot, cool, or cold tiers making it ideal for multi‑year retention and infrequent access.

• Integrated with Azure Blob Storage & tiering: Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive data can exist in the same storage account, and objects can be moved between tiers using blob-level tiering, a single click, or automated lifecycle policies.

• AES‑256 encryption & secure HTTPS transfers: All data at rest is automatically encrypted, and transfers are always secured over HTTPS meeting strict security and compliance requirements.

• Immutable storage for compliance (WORM): Archive tier supports write‑once‑read‑many (WORM) immutability, ensuring data cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention window critical for regulations like SEC 17a‑4, HIPAA, and GDPR.

• Flexible retrieval options: Standard and high‑priority rehydration enable predictable retrieval times, ranging from under 1 hour (for smaller objects) to several hours for larger datasets.

• Supports massive data growth & archiving scenarios: Suitable for long‑term backup retention, medical imaging archives, HR records, email archives, compliance datasets, media libraries, and historical reporting data.

Advantages of Azure Archive Storage

• Significantly reduces storage costs: With the lowest per‑GB pricing in Azure, Archive Storage helps organizations drastically cut costs for data that must be preserved but rarely accessed.

• Perfect for compliance and regulatory retention: Long-term datasets. Financial documents, medical images, tax records and legal archives can be stored securely with data immutability and multi-year retention policies.

• Automated lifecycle management: Azure enables automatic tiering of data from hot/cool to archive using lifecycle rules, reducing manual effort and optimizing cost.

• Highly durable and globally available: Archive Storage offers high durability and redundancy options, allowing global storage coverage for long-term datasets and backup workloads.

• Secure, compliant, and encrypted by default: HTTPS transport and AES‑256 encryption ensures full protection of sensitive data, meeting the highest levels of security expectations.
• Supports vaulted backups for other Azure services: Archive Storage can be used for long-term retention of backups from Azure services such as Azure Blobs, Azure Files, and Azure Data Lake Storage.

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