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The Azure Blob Storage service provides a way to store files in the cloud. The Blob service has a number of advantages over storing files in a local network file system:

• It's highly scalable. A single storage account can store 100 terabytes, and you can have multiple storage accounts. Some of the biggest Azure customers store hundreds of petabytes. Microsoft OneDrive uses Blob storage.

• It's durable. Every file you store in the Blob service is automatically backed up.

• It provides high availability. The SLA for Storage promises 99.9 percent or 99.99 percent uptime, depending on which geo-redundancy option you choose.

• It's a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) feature of Azure, which means you just store and retrieve files, paying only for the actual amount of storage you use, and Azure automatically takes care of setting up and managing all of the VMs and disk drives required for the service.

• You can access the Blob service by using a REST API or by using a programming language API. SDKs are available for .NET, Java, Ruby, and other languages.

• When you store a file in the Blob service, you can easily make it publicly available over the Internet.

• You can secure files in the Blob service so that they can accessed only by authorized users, or you can provide temporary access tokens that makes the files available to someone only for a limited period of time.

Anytime you're building an app for Azure and you want to store a lot of data that in an on-premises environment would go in files—such as images, videos, PDFs, spreadsheets, and so on—consider the Blob service.

Source of Information : Building Cloud Apps With Microsoft Azure