If you’re building on Azure, sooner or later you’ll work with an Azure Storage Account. It’s a foundational service behind many real-world systems, and Blob Storage is one of its most common use cases for handling unstructured data at scale.

Replication strategies, lifecycle management, and Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens are three features that, despite how powerful they are, are often overlooked or underused. Getting them wrong can lead to higher costs, security risks, and unnecessary architectural complexity. These features play a key role in controlling cost, improving resilience, and securing access to data, yet they’re frequently overlooked or misconfigured.

In this session, we’ll explore each of these features in depth and walk through practical, real-world examples. We’ll discuss the trade-offs between different replication options, how lifecycle management can automatically reduce storage costs, and how to safely expose data using SAS tokens without compromising security.

This talk is intended for developers and architects working with Azure who want to go beyond the defaults and make more informed design decisions.