The past year has seen some interesting growth and changes in the cloud space. While cloud services are creating innovations that make the cloud more secure every day, there’s still a lot of fear and doubt about moving to the cloud — and celebrity leaks certainly haven’t helped. But while some companies are hesitant to follow the market in the direction it’s headed. Microsoft is investing in the cloud and reaping the benefits of the cloud market. According to Yahoo Finance, Microsoft reported that sales from its Azure cloud platform services rose 121 percent from its first-quarter revenue. Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund also predicts that Microsoft is on track to make $6 billion a year in cloud revenue. If Sherlund’s prediction is accurate, Microsoft will be the industry’s largest cloud vendor by his calculations, Yahoo Finance reported.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that SoftNAS is now available on Microsoft Azure! An understanding of where the cloud market is going is important to us here at SoftNAS, so we’re proud to be Microsoft Partners.

SoftNAS Cloud NAS on Microsoft Azure

SoftNAS is the most powerful and full-featured Cloud NAS on Microsoft Azure that extends native Azure block and object storage. SoftNAS cloud-based storage solution available in Azure can provide best-in-class cloud-based NAS services over NFS and SMB/ CIFS for your workloads.

SoftNAS is a software-defined NAS delivered as a virtual appliance running within Azure Computing Service. It provides NAS capabilities suitable for the enterprise, including high availability utilizing Azure availability sets with automatic failover in the Azure cloud. SoftNAS runs within your Microsoft Azure account and offers business-critical data protection required for the non-stop operation of applications, websites, and IT infrastructure. 

We’re dedicated to bringing SoftNAS functionality and capabilities to as many people as possible, so here’s what you can do with SoftNAS on Microsoft Azure.

1. Easily manage shared storage capabilities.

If you’ve ever tried to manage shared storage manually you know it?s no easy task. We’ve been providing this capability on other platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware, so of course we brought it with us to Azure. A unified storage system makes managing NFS and CIFS easier than using separate SAN and NAS systems.

2. Keep your data in Microsoft’s data center.

Unlike other cloud storage options on Azure, SoftNAS for Microsoft Azure is built on pure Azure storage infrastructure. This means your company data stays securely in the Microsoft data center where you have complete control over it through your Microsoft account.

3. Enterprise-grade features for increased performance and capacity.

SoftNAS uses some of top industry features to maximize storage performance and capacity. Features such as SSD caching, RAID arrays, deduplication, and compression provide optimal use of storage by reducing redundant data, compressing data to save disk space, boosting performance, and increasing read/write speeds.

4. Our trademarked simple and intuitive management interface.

SoftNAS StorageCenter™ GUI provides the simplest administration experience available. There’s no storage training required with an intuitive interface that any IT person can manage. Its HTML 5 interface also means that it’s compatible with a variety of browsers, including Windows PC, Macs, tablets, and iPhones.

Try SoftNAS Cloud NAS on Microsoft Azure

SoftNAS is designed to support a variety of market verticals, use cases, and workload types. Increasingly, SoftNAS deployed on the Azure platform to enable block and file storage services through Common Internet File System (CIFS), NFS, AFP, and iSCSI.

Get an enterprise-ready cloud NAS capable of managing your fast-growing data storage challenges. Dedicated features from SoftNAS deliver significant cost savings, high availability, lift and shift data migration, and a variety of security protection.