*Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Storage Service Encryption for Azure Files Storage, as well as the “Secure transfer required” feature now being supported in the Azure Government Storage account.

Storage Service Encryption for Azure File Storage

Azure File Storage is a fully managed service providing distributed and cross platform storage. IT organizations can lift and shift on premises file shares to the cloud using Azure Files, by simply pointing the applications to Azure file share path. Thus, agencies can start leveraging cloud without having to incur development costs to adopt cloud storage. Azure Files Storage is now the first fully managed file service offering encryption of data at rest.

Azure Government customers already benefit from Storage Service Encryption for Azure Blob Storage.

Microsoft handles all the encryption, decryption and key management in a fully transparent fashion. All data is encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption, also known as AES-256, one of the strongest block ciphers available. Customers can enable this feature on all available redundancy types of Azure File Storage – LRS and GRS. There is no additional charge for enabling this feature.

You can enable this feature on any Azure Resource Manager storage account using the Azure Portal, Azure Powershell, Azure CLI or the Microsoft Azure Storage Resource Provider API.

Find out more about Storage Service Encryption.

“Secure transfer required”

These features enhances the security of your storage account by enforcing all requests to your account through a secure connection.

Please note: This feature is disabled by default. For more details, see the article “Require secure transfer“.

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