What You Need to Know about Microsoft’s New Multi-Protocol Access and Interoperability for Azure Blob and ADLS Gen2

Ever since Microsoft introduced Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2), enterprises around the globe have been adopting it to drive their data lake and modern analytics initiatives. As ADLS Gen2 adoption has gained momentum, there has been a very active and healthy discussion about interoperability between Azure Blob and ADLS Gen2. If you check out support forums, you’ll see lots of rumors about forthcoming interoperability from Microsoft. Well, the cat is out of the bag as they say, and now Microsoft has made it official – Multi-Protocol Access for ADLS Gen2 is on its way!

The Microsoft Ecosystem team at Informatica has been working closely with Microsoft since before the introduction of ADLS Gen2. Today, we continue that close partnership and are actively working with Microsoft to test and validate the Multi-Protocol Access for ADLS Gen2 with our Intelligent Data Platform products and services. In fact, we’ve already started testing several Informatica products with Azure Blob support using Multi-Protocol Access with ADLS Gen2, and early indications are looking good. For example, we tested our Blob connectivity with our Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services using the Multi-access Protocol against an ADLS Gen2 environment and were able to read and write without any changes to our product. We’re looking forward to continuing these tests across our product portfolio and seeing similarly positive results.

We know that many of our common customers are driving towards ADLS Gen2-based data lakes to eliminate data silos and take advantage of the performance, security, manageability, and cost characteristics of ADLS Gen2. However, with major investments in Azure Blob-based data lakes, customers don't want to wait for all their existing tooling and solutions to be migrated from Azure Blob to ADLS Gen2 to begin their journey.

Informatica is introducing native ADLS Gen2 support across many of our Intelligent Data Management services and products to enable customers to take full advantage of ADLS Gen2 and we expect new customers and new use cases to adopt this native support. But we’ll also continue to work closely with Microsoft on Multi-Protocol Access testing and validation to ensure that our joint customers are successful as they begin their migrations to ADLS Gen2.

Stay tuned for more updates about Informatica’s support for ADLS Gen2. Check out the ADLS Gen2 blog for more information about Interop.

To learn more about how to drive analytics insights with a cloud data lake on Azure, check out “Unleash the Full Power of Data,” a joint eBook from Microsoft and Informatica.