Once we have our Storage account, we can start loading data. This can be any type of file, we can use storage as a staging phase in which we prepare uploaded files before they are actually used, or we can upload files that are directly used by our applications.

Over the years, I've seen many organizations using Azure Storage as a backup location for on-premises SQL databases. This is a convenient way to start our cloud journey as we get relatively cheap storage that is offsite and encrypted.

Once databases are stored to cloud, the next step would be to use backups to restore a database in Azure and start using them either as IaaS or PaaS.

Let's see how we can back up our database directly to Azure Storage.