Traditionally to be a good steward, sharing data or data sets with your partners and customers required leveraging FTP, emailing the data directly, or some other process that would be difficult to track.

Azure Data Share allows you to manage and update your data and its sharing settings utilizing a single pane of glass. The data provider (you) can specify what data to share (currently your options are Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake), who the recipients are, and how often that snapshot of data is updated if you decide to offer a subscription. The data that can be selected is very granular in terms of choosing entire data sets or individual files. The snapshot of the data can be updated as often as every (1) hour in the case of a subscription offering.

The recipient will receive an email with an invitation to access the data snapshot and store it in their Azure tenant (again Blob Storage or Data Lake) where they can now access that data and perform whatever analytics they require. The recipient can transfer the full snapshot of the data as well as the incremental update, limiting the amount of data flowing in, as well as see active and discontinued shares. It is important to note that if a data provider discontinues a Data Share, it does not retroactively remove the data from the data recipient’s storage but rather discontinues new incremental updates.

The data provider can also offer subscriptions to the data set. Once a recipient enables the subscription, incremental updates are automatically reflected in their data snapshot.

The Azure Data Share is in public preview, allowing you to pilot this feature at no cost to your organization. It is an important tool in your Azure storage strategy within your organization. Given the vast array of options within Azure Storage (Blobs, file, managed storage, Data Lakes, etc.), it is important to have a solid strategy in place to ensure data governance and security.

If you or your organization would like to learn more about Azure Data Share or feel you may benefit from a review of your storage strategy, please reach out to me (sdowling@go-planet.com) or your Planet Technologies Account Manager and we can start that conversation today.