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AWS S3 vs. Azure Blob Storage - Which Is Best for You?

Written by VIDIZMO Team | April 11,2022

During the past decade, the concept of data has changed drastically. The volume of unstructured data is increasing. Approximately 90% of unstructured data has been created worldwide in the last two years. As per projections of IDC, by 2025 80% of the global data will be unstructured in the form of images, audio, text, and video.

It is easy to store and analyze structured data as it is already categorized and optimized for analysis. But what about storage and analysis of unstructured data?

This creates significant challenges for high-grade enterprises to store and analyze this massive unstructured data with its sheer variety of file types. Different cloud storage providers are competing in the market to become the best storage services, providers.

So, what are the biggest hitters in the field of cloud storage industry? Amazon Web Services S3 vs Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Service. How do they both differ in terms of their distinguishing features, such as scalability, security, accessibility, etc.?

Before diving deeper, you need to understand what AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage services are? Let's first discuss them one by one.

What is AWS S3 Storage Service?

Amazon S3 is a simple object storage service that offers a wide range of industry-leading storage management features. You can use it to store, optimize, organize, and configure access to data according to various business requirements.

In Amazon S3, data is stored as objects in buckets. An object can be any fundamental entity consisting of object data and metadata. Metadata is the set of value pairs that describe the object data e.g., data type, last modified date etc.

Buckets are like containers where you can store a variety of objects. Each object is identified by its unique key name within the bucket.

But if you have stored multiple videos on S3 and you are interested in streaming them, how will you do that?
Is there any robust platform available where you can upload videos, store them in AWS S3 directly and stream them without downloading first?

Yes, here is an ideal solution to your problem!

You can opt for the most secure and powerful platform VIDIZMO Enterprise Tube for streaming videos stored in AWS S3. VIDIZMO is a Gartner Recognized YouTube-like video streaming platform that empowers organizations to store, encode, manage, share, and stream videos securely in no time.

 

If you are interested to know more about how VIDIZMO Enterprise Tube helps to stream videos from AWS S3,

Read More: A Ready-Made Web Application to stream videos from AWS S3

Features Offered by Amazon S3

When it comes to data storage and its management, Amazon S3 offers the following features.

Storage Classes

Amazon S3 has designed a flexible range of storage classes for different use cases based on data access, resiliency, and cost requirements. You can move and store data across these classes.

For example, you can choose to store your mission-critical production data in the S3 standard storage class for frequent access. Or you can store non-frequently used objects on the S3 Glacier storage class for archival purposes.

Storage Management

Amazon S3 offers storage management features. You can use them to manage costs, and save multiple copies of your data to meet the compliance requirements.

For example, S3 Object Lock is used to prevent deletion and alteration of your stored data or to protect it from being overwritten.

S3 Versioning

Not only that, but you can create multiple versions of your objects within the same bucket. Amazon S3 allows you to preserve and restore every version whenever needed. A unique version ID is generated when you enable S3 versioning in the bucket.

Security and Access Management

Moreover, you can add security layers to your stored data and restrict unauthorized access with encryption features and access management tools such as AWS Identity and Access Management, Access Control Lists, Bucket Policies, Query String Authentication and much more.

Hence, Amazon S3 empowers you to store and protect your data for different use cases such as enterprise applications, data lakes, big data analytics etc.

What is Azure Blob Storage Service?

Blob storage is a feature offered by Microsoft Azure. It allows users to store enormous amounts of unstructured data in Microsoft’s cloud platform with remote access.

Blob stands for binary large objects that do not follow any specific data model such as multimedia files, images, videos etc.

Along with that, you can store your data for backup, restore and archive it, stream audio and video files, serve images and documents directly to the browser and much more.

Do you have videos stored in the Azure cloud and struggling to stream your videos with azure blob storage?

Are you looking for a ready-made platform that supports video streaming?

Then do not look further, VIDIZMO Enterprise Tube is a platform that seamlessly connects with azure blob storage for streaming videos and manages them efficiently.

 

Click here to learn about how VIDIZMO helps to stream videos from Azure Blob storage: Stream videos through Azure Blob Storage.

Features Offered by Azure Blob Storage

Scalability, Durability and Availability

Azure blob storage consists of designed durability with geo replications and flexibility to scale as per your requirements. It provides the necessary scale to assist huge data storage and to meet the demands of HPC applications.

Security and Accessibility

When it comes to security, it is authenticated with Azure Active Directory. Moreover, it provides Role-Based Access Control, encryption at rest as well as advanced threat protection.

Optimization for Data lakes

Azure blob storage is optimized for data lakes in terms of multi-protocol access and file namespace that supports enabling analytics workloads for data insights or any other relevant information.

Data Management

It offers comprehensible, end-to-end life cycle data management and access control capabilities to serve security purposes as well as requirements of mobile applications, websites, and cloud-native applications.

AWS S3 vs Azure Blob Storage Services

AWS S3 and Azure blob storage both share similar features with few differences. Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is suitable for almost all types of organizations because of its outstanding features.

It is user-friendly, scalable, fast, performs accurate analytics through on-premises or azure hosted services and has more data centers globally as compared to Amazon S3.

On the other hand, AWS S3 serves around 190 countries with scalable, reliable, and cost-effective cloud storage infrastructure.

It provides easy-to-use data management features such as organizing data for websites and mobile applications and storing data for recovery and backup.

No matter which platform you choose for storage and its management, it depends on your own business requirements and specific use cases.

Choose the Right Cloud Storage Solution for Video Streaming

VIDIZMO Enterprise Video Content Management is specially designed for enterprises that leverage various Azure and AWS services such as encoding, video indexing and data protection.

It is capable of connecting with your azure blob storage and AWS S3 storage empowering users to store, encode, manage, and stream videos directly from them.

Let's look into its features more closely...

VIDIZMO allows you to:

  • Organize your videos in a video library to upload, manage and stream videos when required.

  • Transcode videos to make them playable in any browser or device format.

  • Stream videos with adaptive streaming through CDN support and modern streaming protocols such as HLS and MPED-DASH.

  • Create multiple autonomous video portals for different departments and video content categorization.

  • Add interactive elements such as quizzes and surveys to your videos for better engagement.

  • Integrate it with your existing IT applications such as LMS, CMS and CRM for data management.

  • Index videos using artificial intelligence to enhance search visibility.

  • Transcribe your videos automatically in around 39+ languages and translate them into more than 50 languages.

  • Stream videos privately with the internal audience or publicly with an external audience.

  • Integrate with SSO and IAM integrations for access management and security with SCIM support.

  • Redact to hide personally identifiable information or any other confidential information appearing in videos through the Standalone Redaction Tool.

We offer much more, want to explore VIDIZMO for more details?

Then either purchase our solution from Azure or AWS marketplace!