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How do I Create an Azure Storage Account?

Last updated: 30 Nov 2023 by Alice Petruzzella

What is an Azure Storage Account?

Storage in Azure is used to group data objects together. For example, all the data is linked to a Finance and Operations (FO) instance, or the working storage for an integration.

The description given by Microsoft is: “An Azure Storage Account contains all of your Azure Storage data objects, including blobs, file shares, queues, tables, and disks. The Storage Account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that's accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Data in your storage account is durable and highly available, secure, and massively scalable.”

For more technical information see the Microsoft documentation.

The creation and configuration of the Azure Storage requires the user to create new resources in Azure. If you are unsure of how to work within Azure, then contact your system administrator.

Where do we use a Storage Account?

An example of where the Lasernet Solution for Dynamics requires working storage is when sending messages between FO and Lasernet The easiest and quickest way to set this up is to use the storage which comes natively with FO.

This works well for testing and dev environments but can cause issues when migrating config between environments. This is where a separate Azure Storage Account can be very useful. By swapping the type to “Azure Storage” it is possible to define a fixed storage account and maintain the relationships between our stored documents and our migrated configuration.

How to create an Azure Storage Account?

1. Log on to the Azure Portal.

2. In the services at the top of the page, select Storage accounts or use the search bar.

This will take you to a list of the Azure Storage Accounts in your subscriptions.

3. Click Create.

The following screen is displayed:

Subscription	Where this resource group will be located.
Resource Group	The group where this resource is created. Organizations often have a specific “Lasernet” resource group. If you are unsure, please contact your system administrator.
Region	The physical location of the hardware on which the Azure Storage Account is located.
Storage Account Name	The name you want to give to your new storage account, there may be naming conventions in your organization that should be followed.
Performance	Leave this as standard.
Redundancy	Leave this as standard, or in a non-production environment “Locally Redundant Storage” will work as a much more cost-effective option.

4. Ensure all the above information is filled in and then click Review.

If your config passes the review, the Create button will become available.

5. Once you have clicked create, you will see that the deployment is in progress and then when the deployment is complete you can go directly to the resource:

Once the resource is created, the following screen is displayed:

6. To reference this storage account in Lasernet we need to do two things. Copy the Connection String and create a container to store our data in.

Create a Container

1. Navigate to Containers.

2. Click Container to add a new container.

The following screen will be shown:

3. Give your storage container a name, accept the other defaults, and click Create.

You can see your new container has been added to the list:

Copy the access key

1. To copy the access key, navigate to Access Keys on the left of the storage account window.

2. From within this screen copy the connection string linked to key1, click show next to the string, and then use the Copy to clipboard icon to copy the whole string.