This week during our discovery session with one of our new customer and Azure Black Belt Team members we came to know about a new storage type called Archive Storage which is still in development phase. It is also mentioned in the Microsoft Cloud Platform roadmap documentation which provides a snapshot of what Microsoft is working on in their Cloud Platform business. You can use the document to find out which cloud services are

• recently made generally available
• released into public preview
• are still developing and testing
• or are no longer developing

As per documentation,

Azure Archive Storage is a very low cost cloud storage for data that is archived and very rarely accessed with retrieval time in hours.  It can be useful for archive data such as medical reports, compliance documents, exchange mails, etc. that are accessed rarely but need to be stored for many years.

Currently Azure Storage offers two storage tiers for Blob - Hot and cool storage. Azure hot storage tier - is optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently. Azure cool storage tier - is optimized for storing data that is infrequently accessed and long-lived. Azure Archive Storage is different than Hot and Cold because it’s in a way offline data storage. And that’s the reason if the Archive Storage data need to be accessed then it will be made online with retrieval time in hours. It will also be cheaper than Cold storage almost half price. With Archive Storage there will be an option to apply a policy to move the data from hot or cold tier to Archive. For example, you can have an automated process based on a policy to move any data which is one-year-old to archive storage. I hope archive storage type would provide an option to enterprise customers to store archival data in most cost-effective way in Azure.