Box using Azure: accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft

In June, we announced that Box and Microsoft are expanding their partnership and will jointly offer Box cloud content management using Microsoft Azure services. Today, we're thrilled to announce Box using Azure, the first offering from this partnership which delivers Box Cloud Content Management - the combination of centralized, cloud-native content services with advanced security and governance - using Microsoft Azure storage services.

Onstage at BoxWorks earlier today, Scott Guthrie of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division joined our co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie to announce that Box using Azure will be generally available on November 1st.

“Box Skills brings together Box’s cloud content management and Microsoft Azure’s industry leading AI services to deliver intelligent insights for customers,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division. “We’re excited to see how the general availability of Box using Azure, that starts November 1st, will help benefit customers in their digital transformation journey.”

Leveraging public cloud services has been a key focus of our engineering team for the past couple of years, with the core goal of separating our application and service from how and where we store encrypted files. This affords us the flexibility to leverage both our own data centers and industry leading cloud partners like Microsoft to accelerate our footprint to serve a broader set of customers, worldwide. This partnership also enables us to accelerate innovations such as new Content Intelligence services using AI and machine learning.

Box using Azure enables businesses to:

• Simplify secure, cross-company collaborative processes between employees and external stakeholders. With integrations for Office 365 and over 2000 best of breed SaaS apps, Box using Azure can centrally manage content for these applications while allowing users to work with their familiar productivity and line-of-business tools.
• Bring Box cloud content management capabilities to their own applications to quickly build engaging digital experiences with content for their employees, customers and partners.
• Use advanced AI and machine learning techniques, such as Video Indexer from Microsoft Cognitive Services, to extract rich information and allow the system to automatically identify and categorize content, trigger workflows and tasks, to make content more discoverable for users and allow the system to automatically identify and categorize content. [coming soon]
• Leverage Azure's broad global footprint to meet data sovereignty requirements and ensure compliance with industry regulations or corporate policies. [coming soon]

Box add-on packages can be used with Box using Azure, including: information governance to meet all your organization’s security requirements and compliance standards, customer-managed encryption keys to take ownership over your encryption keys, and workflow automation to streamline business processes.

Thousands of businesses already get work done using Box with Microsoft products like Microsoft Office 365 and Office Online. In fact, Microsoft Office files are among the most uploaded, edited and shared files in Box. Leveraging and providing deeper integration with Azure services is another step in ensuring we deliver a great user experience for our customers using Box with the Microsoft stack, including Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Windows, Active Directory and Intune.

At Box, our mission is to power how the world works together and our engineering teams have worked tirelessly over the past four months to deliver Box using Azure. Now they're working even harder to explore ways to integrate AI capabilities enabled by Microsoft Cognitive Services and add Azure regions outside the U.S. to our Box Zones solution for in-region storage on Azure's trusted global footprint. Stay tuned for more updates over the coming months!

If you're interested in Box using Azure, learn more or get in touch with Box Sales.