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Overview: Remediating anonymous read access for blob data

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Azure Storage supports optional anonymous read access for containers and blobs. By default, anonymous access to your data is never permitted. Unless you explicitly enable anonymous access, all requests to a container and its blobs must be authorized. We recommend that you disable anonymous access for all of your storage accounts.

This article provides an overview of how to remediate anonymous access for your storage accounts.

Warning

Anonymous access presents a security risk. We recommend that you take the actions described in the following section to remediate anonymous access for all of your storage accounts, unless your scenario specifically requires anonymous access.

Recommendations for remediating anonymous access

To remediate anonymous access, first determine whether your storage account uses the Azure Resource Manager deployment model or the classic deployment model. For more information, see Resource Manager and classic deployment.

Azure Resource Manager accounts

If your storage account is using the Azure Resource Manager deployment model, then you can remediate anonymous access for an account at any time by setting the account's AllowBlobPublicAccess property to False. After you set the AllowBlobPublicAccess property to False, all requests for blob data to that storage account will require authorization, regardless of the anonymous access setting for any individual container.

If your storage account is using the Azure Resource Manager deployment model, then you can remediate anonymous access for an account at any time by setting the account's AllowBlobAnonymousAccess property to False. After you set the AllowBlobAnonymousAccess property to False, all requests for blob data to that storage account will require authorization, regardless of the anonymous access setting for any individual container.

To learn more about how to remediate anonymous access for Azure Resource Manager accounts, see Remediate anonymous read access to blob data (Azure Resource Manager deployments).

Classic accounts

If your storage account is using the classic deployment model, then you can remediate anonymous access by setting each container's access property to Private. To learn more about how to remediate anonymous access for classic storage accounts, see Remediate anonymous read access to blob data (classic deployments).

Scenarios requiring anonymous access

If your scenario requires that certain containers need to be available for anonymous access, then you should move those containers and their blobs into separate storage accounts that are reserved only for anonymous access. You can then disallow anonymous access for any other storage accounts using the recommendations provided in Recommendations for remediating anonymous access.

For information on how to configure containers for anonymous access, see Configure anonymous read access for containers and blobs.

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