Create an Azure Storage Account

This guide walks you through the process of creating a new Azure Storage account, the foundation for Azure's storage services.

Azure Storage offers a highly scalable, highly available, and highly durable storage solution for your data. Creating a storage account is the first step to leveraging services like Blob Storage, File Storage, Queue Storage, and Table Storage.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following:

Steps to Create a Storage Account

  1. Sign in to the Azure Portal

    Open your web browser and navigate to the Azure portal. Sign in with your Azure account credentials.

  2. Navigate to Storage Accounts

    In the Azure portal search bar at the top, type "Storage accounts" and select "Storage accounts" from the search results.

    Search for Storage Accounts in Azure Portal

    Alternatively, you can click the menu icon (three horizontal lines) in the top-left corner, then select "All services", and search for "Storage accounts" under the "Storage" category.

  3. Create a New Storage Account

    On the Storage Accounts page, click the "+ Create" button to start the creation process.

    Click Create button for Storage Account

  4. Configure Basic Settings

    You will be taken to the "Create storage account" page. Fill in the required fields on the "Basics" tab:

    • Subscription: Select the Azure subscription under which you want to create the storage account.
    • Resource group: Choose an existing resource group or create a new one. Resource groups help organize your Azure resources.
    • Storage account name: Enter a globally unique name for your storage account. This name will be part of the URL used to access your data. It must be between 3 and 24 characters long and can contain only lowercase letters and numbers.
    • Region: Select the Azure region where you want your storage account to be located. Choose a region geographically close to your users for better performance.
    • Performance: Choose between "Standard" (for general-purpose v2 accounts) and "Premium" (for specialized workloads like high-performance computing).
    • Redundancy: Select the desired data redundancy option (e.g., LRS, GRS, RA-GRS). This determines how many copies of your data are stored and where.
    Storage Account Basics Configuration

  5. Configure Advanced Settings (Optional)

    Navigate to the "Advanced" tab. Here you can configure settings like:

    • Access tier: Choose the default access tier (Hot or Cool) for blobs.
    • Hierarchical namespace: Enable this for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 capabilities.
    • Networking: Configure network access rules, including firewall settings and private endpoints.
    • Data protection: Set up soft delete, versioning, and other data recovery features.

  6. Review and Create

    Go to the "Review + create" tab. Azure will validate your configuration. Once validation passes, review the settings and click the "Create" button.

    Storage Account Review and Create

After Creation

Once the deployment is complete, you can navigate to your new storage account. From there, you can:

Important: Remember to secure your storage account. Avoid using access keys directly in client-side applications and consider using Azure AD for authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) whenever possible.
Tip: For a quick start, you can use Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell to automate the creation of storage accounts. 

az storage account create \
    --name mystorageaccountname \
    --resource-group myresourcegroup \
    --location eastus \
    --sku Standard_LRS \
    --kind StorageV2