best way to configure access to network shares on a vm

Question

I am migrating our network share folders [under a TB] and the goal is to eventually rid ourselves of our onprem server. currently the employees access via an VPN and then RDC. what are my options for accessing the shares that will be on the azure VM?
I have been able to map a drive to the azure vm file share. Would that be the best course of action here or should i be creating a vpn with a private IP?
If we go that route do the users need to have RDC licenses in place to access the vm file share?
What other options do i have? Preferably it would be cool to use Azure AD to authenticate to the VM but some of our users are hybrid users and not sure if this will work?
thanks!

Answer 1

@MReed Firstly, apologies for the delay in responding here and any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

• SMB file shares can be mounted on your local machine by using the SMB 3.x protocol, or you can use tools like Storage Explorer to access files in your file share. NFS file shares can be mounted on your local machine by copy/pasting the script provided by the Azure portal. From your application, you can use storage client libraries, REST APIs, PowerShell, or Azure CLI to access your files in the Azure file share

To learn more about azure files, see FAQs

• Authorize access to data in Azure File Storage: Shared Key (storage account key), Azure Active Directory (Supported, only with AAD Domain Services), On-premises Active Directory Domain Services (Supported, credentials must be synced to Azure AD)
  - Using Azure file shares in a hybrid environment: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/hybrid/azure-file-share
• You can use a Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN connection to mount your Azure file shares over SMB from outside of Azure, without opening up port 445. A Point-to-Site VPN connection is a VPN connection between Azure and an individual client. See here for detailed information
  -Azure Files SMB Access with Windows AD allows you to access file shares in Azure with NTFS access control. By default, that access won’t extend to an on-prem network over VPN or Express Route. This video shows how to extend access to an Azure Files share with Windows

Hope this helps!
Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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