In my opinion, Microsoft can improve Microsoft Azure File Storage by closing the open questions that a lot of customers have raised. There were previously some issues that I cannot recall exactly. The price for Microsoft Azure File Storage could definitely be lower.
The pricing of Microsoft Azure File Storage is a bit high. We need to know the nuances of using it; we can use everything for log storage, which will have terabytes of data stored. We need to be conscious about whether we are going to have cold storage or hot storage. Based on that, our pricing will differ. Pricing-wise, we need to get the experience before we can decide on the pricing. Upfront, they need to be more transparent on the pricing for the service selected. The pricing structure of Microsoft Azure File Storage should be more transparent because there are two types of storage, live and cold. Cold storage is much cheaper, but the live or hot storage is a bit costly.
Senior System Administrator at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
MSP
Top 10
Aug 5, 2025
I don't have exact details about potential improvements for Microsoft Azure File Storage at this time because we are mainly working for IT, but except IT, we also have our developer team and testing team, and I would need to see how they are thinking about it. Based on our use case, I think maybe that cost is actually more. That's the main challenge; when going to Microsoft, that cost tends to be greater. If they could work on that, it would help.
Database Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Consultant
Top 5
Apr 3, 2025
There is a limitation on the storage capacity, like four terabytes. It could be improved to accommodate more data. Expanding the storage capacity would be beneficial.
Senior Data Production Engineer at a wellness & fitness company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Nov 22, 2024
The transparency of cost should be improved. We would appreciate having more transparency regarding pricing, which would help us determine our efficiency in working with cloud solutions. Pricing flexibility is essential.
The tool needs to be more intuitive. Also, the product name keeps changing. It can be confusing when product names change frequently, especially with Microsoft. Sometimes, if you refer to a product by a certain name last year, it might have a different name six months later.
A lot of things could be better, especially when it comes to accessing File Storage for monitoring. Azure Copy is fine, but there could be additional integration and security features for those who want more privacy and control over access to Azure.
Program Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
MSP
Jul 13, 2023
If it is not for an application, then SharePoint or Office 365 could actually solve our problem for file storage and internal communications. But if you want to access files within an application, using Azure would be preferable. However, the solution could use some additional tools for sharing files. It would be great to have everything in one place for a more streamlined experience. Another area of improvement is pricing. Maybe Microsoft can make it more economical because it is a costly affair. So if they can optimize their pricing for broader customer use, including small and medium-sized companies.
IT Consultant at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Consultant
Top 20
Jul 6, 2023
There is always going to be room for improvement. Certain use cases will evolve where file storage is used with visual ID and group mapping. As long as the dynamic mapping is working seamlessly, there aren’t any changes needed in Microsoft Azure File Storage. As of now, I've got no such recommendations. Importing and exporting data needs to have a bit more documentation. Recently, Microsoft has actually stepped up and provided some training about securing data but they need to have a solution in case the data needs to be migrated. They need to include a service to securely transfer the data through Microsoft and encrypt it.
I have used the file storage explorer in multiple systems, and it seems a bit cumbersome and not very efficient, particularly with authentication. It can be tricky to set it up. As a developer or technical asset of Microsoft Azure Data Storage, it's relatively easy to navigate. However, for non-technical individuals attempting to use the file storage on their laptops and installing file storage explorer, there may be authentication issues that are difficult to resolve from a non-technical perspective. This has been my experience, and I believe it could be challenging for someone who is not tech-savvy.
CTO at a construction company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Mar 9, 2023
The integration of the site storage with SQL was not completely seamless. We had to do some extra steps as there was no immediate support for file storage, only for block storage. For whatever reason, since we were working with a managed service and a secure service, most of the connections we made were not very successful. We had to do some networking. The integration has room for improvement. In our process, we use the entire system just as an intermediate. An ideal solution is to gather the information from the endpoint and then move it into a database or sign-up. With that, we can do some analytics. In the future, it would be nice if there was a tight progression between the five storage and the analytical tools. For example, if we are working with Power BI, it would be very helpful if we could point to the signer, SQL environment, global environment, or file system environment and have them be completely synchronous.
Microsoft Azure File Storage needs more integrations. I encountered a problem with the solution: Microsoft said you could directly integrate Azure file share on your PC by enabling that feature in Microsoft Azure File Storage. It worked at first, but then, when I restarted my PC, that feature stopped working. I did that only for research purposes, so I wonder if Microsoft fixed that bug or if that Azure file share integration feature in Microsoft Azure File Storage was designed wrong. In the future, I also want to see GRC added to the portal to integrate it with Microsoft Azure File Storage and other Azure services. If you enroll or sign up for Azure services, your country may not have GRC available in the portal, so you may have to choose a strange country, for example, Kenya, to activate credit. Having GRC helps many students, enterprises, and users easily access Microsoft Azure File Storage.
Operations Team Lead at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Real User
Nov 8, 2022
The way retention policies are applied could be more optimized. Additionally, the pricing should be more competitive with other CHPs, and stability can be improved.
One thing that Azure File Storage could help us with is some kind of impact assessment. When we talk to some of our larger customers who have between 500 and 1,000 applications, we normally do an assessment of all these applications and then tell them which ones are ready to be lifted and shifted, and which ones need to re-architected. It would really help if Azure File Storage could come up with a better way to give estimations of the total investment required, including all costs incurred during the migration. For some aspects of file storage, there will only be approximate requirements, but for others there are empirical formulas, and it would greatly assist the solution architects and customers to have access to better assessments in this area. For instance, in one case we had, there was an unexpected escalation of costs which were not factored in from the beginning. Of course, this wasn't Azure's fault, but an impact assessment to prevent this kind of occurrence would definitely help. And, I believe, it would be a win-win for both us and Azure, because it would help Azure bring the right customers to the table. Another thing I could see being useful is some form of diagnostic tool with perhaps a list of errors that can potentially happen. From a solution architect perspective, I would want to give my customers some pointers about possible pitfalls, and a diagnostic tool like this would make it much easier for me. From an internal team perspective, there's also lot of improvements that could be done when it comes to Active Directory. We find a lot of errors occur in our Single Sign-On integration with AD because not all scenarios are integrated from isolated networks, and they are often not configured to be isolated during the project. So, at times, when you go live, you'll suddenly hear someone screaming. To prevent these errors, I would propose a type of auto-discovery feature that is automated to some extent. Finally, a typical issue that we see during file migrations is failed transfers for whatever reason (e.g. network connection issues), and the current methods that Azure employs for dealing with these failures could be improved upon. My suggestion would be some kind of transfer management solution, especially one that is enabled for mobile. With this, there might be a type of dashboard where I would be able to easily see what percentage of the transfer has been completed, and take the actions necessary to go back and restart the transfer at the point where it failed. Anything more intuitive than the current solution would help us during file transfer failures.
Next year, I will likely change my equipment to update everything. That would be better. It's not very intuitive. I'd like the screen to be more user-friendly. The usability is not good.
Manager - IT at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Jan 20, 2022
In our use cases, we see the weakness in mobile internet connectivity. When the user clicks the pictures of the identification and verification, addresses, those images have different sizes. If you click via the HD camera, it takes four to six Mbps. The issue is not with the Microsoft Azure File Storage, but the issue is at the front end when it is uploaded from the mobile network. This is the main pain area for us, and we are looking for a way to compress the images to the best possible minimum size, to allow them to be uploaded without any issues, without any dependencies on the external network.
Infrastructure Team at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oct 28, 2021
Keep attention and do not share the storage account key since it can be a security issue. With the storage account key, you can do everything you want on the storage account and on the file shares. It can be useful because this is the only way to work at home with an unmanaged PC from my company, but at the same time, if you share this key to external users, it could be a security issue. It's a bit tricky to manage the permissions, because you have to set RBAC rights then mount the Azure File Share on your PC/server and then start to manage NTFS permissions locally. The ability to check the open files would be a nice additional feature. On-premise you can check which files are open. On Azure, I haven't found this part. Management and Troubleshooting often need Powershell commands.
Manager Cloud Platform at AGILE CLOUD SOLUTIONS LLC
Real User
Jul 27, 2021
The solution should support all the legacy storage systems. They should make it easy to migrate in one click. In terms of storage and latency, it should be more optimized. The Microsoft File System should support all the regions. Some customers want to use SharePoint instead of File Share. SharePoint offers one terabyte of storage for an organization, and for small or medium organizations, this size is good enough to store their files. However, Microsoft should also think of very small organizations that might only have 10 or 20 users spread across the world. It would be ideal if they had some sort of file share system designed for their much smaller needs.
We have performance issues with Microsoft Azure File Storage. We have a standard version and we have also a premium version. I would like to upgrade to premium but that is not possible on the fly. So you really need to do a migration. I was investigating when do I get to the boundaries of the premium storage. Because now we have a couple of users using it, but I'm sure that once we got to premium, there will come a time that we will again have performance issues. That's why I was looking into comparisons with the NetApp store. It seems that it has a higher performance for the roaming profile. I feel that we cannot just upgrade but we should really do an immigration with all the difficulties. There are limits to the usage capacity-wise, and it is not easy to measure because they just use some other figures. You really need to understand what you are seeing if you do performance monitoring. I do not think that NetApp is better in that way, to be honest.
Senior Director of IT Operations at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Feb 26, 2020
I think the place where the product really needs the most attention is in the Intune and the MDM products. They are building it out pretty quickly in updates, yet at the same time that is probably the place where I have seen the most reason to simplifying for ease-of-use. Right now you kind of have to spend some time to wrap your head around the product instead of it being something that is easier to use and easier to onboard into production. In a way, that is just part of the industry standard right now. Any MDM product you choose is going to be a little difficult that way, and it is going to require some build-out that is maybe more than you had expected or cared to dive into. If they improved Intune to where it was more deployable out-of-the-box, that would be great. We just have to wait and see if they can do it.
CTO & Co-Founder at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
Real User
Feb 13, 2020
The pricing could be improved. They need to make the costs more transparent so users know what they will be charged and why ahead of time. Technical support could be improved.
So far we haven't had any difficulties with migrations. Sometimes I call support to help me with the migration of the servers. So far it has been all very easy.
Microsoft Azure File Storage offers seamless integration within Azure, delivering scalable, user-friendly, and secure file storage solutions. It features excellent data redundancy, lifecycle management, and integration with Microsoft tools, catering to diverse environments efficiently.Azure File Storage provides robust file server capabilities and is highly valued for its integration with Active Directory and cloud applications. Its scalability and strong security features, including private...
In my opinion, Microsoft can improve Microsoft Azure File Storage by closing the open questions that a lot of customers have raised. There were previously some issues that I cannot recall exactly. The price for Microsoft Azure File Storage could definitely be lower.
I am not using the file sync option with Microsoft Azure File Storage. Currently, there is nothing that we are searching to improve or enhance.
The pricing of Microsoft Azure File Storage is a bit high. We need to know the nuances of using it; we can use everything for log storage, which will have terabytes of data stored. We need to be conscious about whether we are going to have cold storage or hot storage. Based on that, our pricing will differ. Pricing-wise, we need to get the experience before we can decide on the pricing. Upfront, they need to be more transparent on the pricing for the service selected. The pricing structure of Microsoft Azure File Storage should be more transparent because there are two types of storage, live and cold. Cold storage is much cheaper, but the live or hot storage is a bit costly.
I don't have exact details about potential improvements for Microsoft Azure File Storage at this time because we are mainly working for IT, but except IT, we also have our developer team and testing team, and I would need to see how they are thinking about it. Based on our use case, I think maybe that cost is actually more. That's the main challenge; when going to Microsoft, that cost tends to be greater. If they could work on that, it would help.
There is a limitation on the storage capacity, like four terabytes. It could be improved to accommodate more data. Expanding the storage capacity would be beneficial.
Some chunking logics need to be better to address issues with processing bigger files. It should allow better methods for handling large files.
The transparency of cost should be improved. We would appreciate having more transparency regarding pricing, which would help us determine our efficiency in working with cloud solutions. Pricing flexibility is essential.
I would like to see more updates around File Storage.
Some of the procedures are a bit more complex in Azure than in other providers.
The tool needs to be more intuitive. Also, the product name keeps changing. It can be confusing when product names change frequently, especially with Microsoft. Sometimes, if you refer to a product by a certain name last year, it might have a different name six months later.
It’s a challenge to find the right support person. The technical support must be improved.
A lot of things could be better, especially when it comes to accessing File Storage for monitoring. Azure Copy is fine, but there could be additional integration and security features for those who want more privacy and control over access to Azure.
The product must provide better security functions.
Microsoft Azure File Storage should improve its pricing.
If it is not for an application, then SharePoint or Office 365 could actually solve our problem for file storage and internal communications. But if you want to access files within an application, using Azure would be preferable. However, the solution could use some additional tools for sharing files. It would be great to have everything in one place for a more streamlined experience. Another area of improvement is pricing. Maybe Microsoft can make it more economical because it is a costly affair. So if they can optimize their pricing for broader customer use, including small and medium-sized companies.
There is always going to be room for improvement. Certain use cases will evolve where file storage is used with visual ID and group mapping. As long as the dynamic mapping is working seamlessly, there aren’t any changes needed in Microsoft Azure File Storage. As of now, I've got no such recommendations. Importing and exporting data needs to have a bit more documentation. Recently, Microsoft has actually stepped up and provided some training about securing data but they need to have a solution in case the data needs to be migrated. They need to include a service to securely transfer the data through Microsoft and encrypt it.
I think the pricing of the product can be reduced.
The solution is not user-friendly.
I have used the file storage explorer in multiple systems, and it seems a bit cumbersome and not very efficient, particularly with authentication. It can be tricky to set it up. As a developer or technical asset of Microsoft Azure Data Storage, it's relatively easy to navigate. However, for non-technical individuals attempting to use the file storage on their laptops and installing file storage explorer, there may be authentication issues that are difficult to resolve from a non-technical perspective. This has been my experience, and I believe it could be challenging for someone who is not tech-savvy.
The upload speed has room for improvement.
Licensing costs are expensive and I'd like to see the price come down.
The integration of the site storage with SQL was not completely seamless. We had to do some extra steps as there was no immediate support for file storage, only for block storage. For whatever reason, since we were working with a managed service and a secure service, most of the connections we made were not very successful. We had to do some networking. The integration has room for improvement. In our process, we use the entire system just as an intermediate. An ideal solution is to gather the information from the endpoint and then move it into a database or sign-up. With that, we can do some analytics. In the future, it would be nice if there was a tight progression between the five storage and the analytical tools. For example, if we are working with Power BI, it would be very helpful if we could point to the signer, SQL environment, global environment, or file system environment and have them be completely synchronous.
Microsoft Azure File Storage needs more integrations. I encountered a problem with the solution: Microsoft said you could directly integrate Azure file share on your PC by enabling that feature in Microsoft Azure File Storage. It worked at first, but then, when I restarted my PC, that feature stopped working. I did that only for research purposes, so I wonder if Microsoft fixed that bug or if that Azure file share integration feature in Microsoft Azure File Storage was designed wrong. In the future, I also want to see GRC added to the portal to integrate it with Microsoft Azure File Storage and other Azure services. If you enroll or sign up for Azure services, your country may not have GRC available in the portal, so you may have to choose a strange country, for example, Kenya, to activate credit. Having GRC helps many students, enterprises, and users easily access Microsoft Azure File Storage.
The pricing and technical support could be better.
The way retention policies are applied could be more optimized. Additionally, the pricing should be more competitive with other CHPs, and stability can be improved.
One thing that Azure File Storage could help us with is some kind of impact assessment. When we talk to some of our larger customers who have between 500 and 1,000 applications, we normally do an assessment of all these applications and then tell them which ones are ready to be lifted and shifted, and which ones need to re-architected. It would really help if Azure File Storage could come up with a better way to give estimations of the total investment required, including all costs incurred during the migration. For some aspects of file storage, there will only be approximate requirements, but for others there are empirical formulas, and it would greatly assist the solution architects and customers to have access to better assessments in this area. For instance, in one case we had, there was an unexpected escalation of costs which were not factored in from the beginning. Of course, this wasn't Azure's fault, but an impact assessment to prevent this kind of occurrence would definitely help. And, I believe, it would be a win-win for both us and Azure, because it would help Azure bring the right customers to the table. Another thing I could see being useful is some form of diagnostic tool with perhaps a list of errors that can potentially happen. From a solution architect perspective, I would want to give my customers some pointers about possible pitfalls, and a diagnostic tool like this would make it much easier for me. From an internal team perspective, there's also lot of improvements that could be done when it comes to Active Directory. We find a lot of errors occur in our Single Sign-On integration with AD because not all scenarios are integrated from isolated networks, and they are often not configured to be isolated during the project. So, at times, when you go live, you'll suddenly hear someone screaming. To prevent these errors, I would propose a type of auto-discovery feature that is automated to some extent. Finally, a typical issue that we see during file migrations is failed transfers for whatever reason (e.g. network connection issues), and the current methods that Azure employs for dealing with these failures could be improved upon. My suggestion would be some kind of transfer management solution, especially one that is enabled for mobile. With this, there might be a type of dashboard where I would be able to easily see what percentage of the transfer has been completed, and take the actions necessary to go back and restart the transfer at the point where it failed. Anything more intuitive than the current solution would help us during file transfer failures.
It would be helpful if we could remove data that we don't frequently access to reduce the cost of the storage.
Next year, I will likely change my equipment to update everything. That would be better. It's not very intuitive. I'd like the screen to be more user-friendly. The usability is not good.
In our use cases, we see the weakness in mobile internet connectivity. When the user clicks the pictures of the identification and verification, addresses, those images have different sizes. If you click via the HD camera, it takes four to six Mbps. The issue is not with the Microsoft Azure File Storage, but the issue is at the front end when it is uploaded from the mobile network. This is the main pain area for us, and we are looking for a way to compress the images to the best possible minimum size, to allow them to be uploaded without any issues, without any dependencies on the external network.
Keep attention and do not share the storage account key since it can be a security issue. With the storage account key, you can do everything you want on the storage account and on the file shares. It can be useful because this is the only way to work at home with an unmanaged PC from my company, but at the same time, if you share this key to external users, it could be a security issue. It's a bit tricky to manage the permissions, because you have to set RBAC rights then mount the Azure File Share on your PC/server and then start to manage NTFS permissions locally. The ability to check the open files would be a nice additional feature. On-premise you can check which files are open. On Azure, I haven't found this part. Management and Troubleshooting often need Powershell commands.
The solution should support all the legacy storage systems. They should make it easy to migrate in one click. In terms of storage and latency, it should be more optimized. The Microsoft File System should support all the regions. Some customers want to use SharePoint instead of File Share. SharePoint offers one terabyte of storage for an organization, and for small or medium organizations, this size is good enough to store their files. However, Microsoft should also think of very small organizations that might only have 10 or 20 users spread across the world. It would be ideal if they had some sort of file share system designed for their much smaller needs.
We have performance issues with Microsoft Azure File Storage. We have a standard version and we have also a premium version. I would like to upgrade to premium but that is not possible on the fly. So you really need to do a migration. I was investigating when do I get to the boundaries of the premium storage. Because now we have a couple of users using it, but I'm sure that once we got to premium, there will come a time that we will again have performance issues. That's why I was looking into comparisons with the NetApp store. It seems that it has a higher performance for the roaming profile. I feel that we cannot just upgrade but we should really do an immigration with all the difficulties. There are limits to the usage capacity-wise, and it is not easy to measure because they just use some other figures. You really need to understand what you are seeing if you do performance monitoring. I do not think that NetApp is better in that way, to be honest.
I'd like to see integration with other platforms as part of the solution. If you have a company to do cloud strategy that could have an impact.
I think the place where the product really needs the most attention is in the Intune and the MDM products. They are building it out pretty quickly in updates, yet at the same time that is probably the place where I have seen the most reason to simplifying for ease-of-use. Right now you kind of have to spend some time to wrap your head around the product instead of it being something that is easier to use and easier to onboard into production. In a way, that is just part of the industry standard right now. Any MDM product you choose is going to be a little difficult that way, and it is going to require some build-out that is maybe more than you had expected or cared to dive into. If they improved Intune to where it was more deployable out-of-the-box, that would be great. We just have to wait and see if they can do it.
The pricing could be improved. They need to make the costs more transparent so users know what they will be charged and why ahead of time. Technical support could be improved.
So far we haven't had any difficulties with migrations. Sometimes I call support to help me with the migration of the servers. So far it has been all very easy.