Azure blob storage and security

Question

I'm in the process of deciding which technology to use for a project. The project will store large amounts of documents (Word, PDF etc) and I'm trying to figure out the best way of storing them. So far, I've come up with:

1. Standard hosting, and using the file system
2. Standard hosting, use Full Text Search and store documents in SQL Server
3. Use Azure Blobs.

Under no circumstances can the documents be visible to anyone. Only certain, authorised people should be able to view documents. Can anyone point me in the direction of how you can secure the documents so that you can't just point a browser to it and it will be visible?

Answer 1

Windows Azure blobs are a great place to store a lot of documents. By default, blobs can only be retrieved by someone who has the access key for the account. (The headers on API calls have to be signed with that key, so there's a cryptographic guarantee that unauthorized third-parties can't access them.)

I assume you'll host a front-end of some sort that gives access to authorized users, and this front-end will act as a proxy to the files themselves.

Answer 2

Don't store your documents in a web server directory. It's as simple as that. Why go through the all the efforts of configuring a web server when you don't want the files on the web in the first place?