Microsoft wants to make big data sharing easier with Azure Data Share

Microsoft has announced a new Azure service to make it easier and safer to share big data among organizations. The service is called Azure Data Share, writes Venturebeat.

According to Microsoft, sharing large data files outside an organization can be complex and expensive. In addition, it often lacks the scale, security and policy controls that enterprises need.

Azure Data Share should provide a simple and secure solution to share big data. For example, the data is protected by using underlying Azure security measures, such as authentication, encryption and instant access revocation.

This allows data providers to set up a new data share with datasets from different Azure data sources. Companies can then invite multiple customers and partners to the share, while retaining control over the sensitive information in the share.

In addition, providers can manage and monitor themselves who has been in the data share and how often they have received updates. Moreover, providers do not have to set up their own infrastructure or write a single line of code.

Azure Blob API

Azure Data Share is not the only service that Microsoft has announced. The company also launched the public preview of Azure Blob API interoperability with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. This allows customers to manage workloads with Blob APIs, in addition to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 APIs.

Azure Data Lake Gen2 was unveiled in February this year. This is a data management service with a repository for storing structured and unstructured data compatible with Hadoop Distributed file systems.

An Azure Blob File System driver was already available at the launch, allowing users to easily access the data. It is designed to be used with analytics services such as Power BI and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. It allows users to build reusable ETL packages with the simplicity of pointing and clicking.