Azure Updates: Storage; AI governance; Apps and agents

Microsoft VP Aung Oo shared insights on the future of Azure Storage in 2026. The company is working to evolve Storage to be a unified intelligent platform to support customer AI initiatives. It is advancing large-scale inferencing, frontier model training, agentic apps, and cloud-native apps. 

“Innovations that helped OpenAI to operate at unprecedented scale are now available for all enterprises. Blob scaled accounts allow storage to scale across hundreds of scale units within a region, handling millions of objects required to enable enterprise data to be used as training and tuning datasets for applied AI. Our partnership with NVIDIA DGX on Azure shows that scale translates into real-world inference,” Oo wrote. Going forward, Microsoft is creating third-party integrations with Foundry, Ray, Anyscale, and LangChain integrations, as well as Blob Storage integration with Foundry. 

Microsoft VP Cyril Belikoff looked into ways to deliver on AI and agent strategy with Microsoft Marketplace. Many organizations are now embedding AI across each layer of their operations to improve delivery, scalability, and access untapped business potential. Dubbed “Frontier Firms,” these organizations are rebuilding around AI.