Connecting Azure Blog storage to gather360

Connecting Azure Blog storage to gather360

Follow our setup guide to connect Azure Blob Storage to gather360.

Prerequisites

To connect Azure Blob Storage to gather360, you need:
  1. An Azure Blob Storage container holding files with supported file types and encodings
  2. The ability to grant gathe360 the ability to read and list files from this container

Setup instructions

Step 1 - Select connection method

First decide whether to connect gather360 to your Azure Blob Storage container directly, using an SSH tunnel, or using Azure Private Link.

Connect directly

gather360 connects directly to your Azure Blob Storage container. This is the simplest connection method.
To connect directly, create a firewall rule to allow access to gather360 IPs.
IMPORTANT: You must have a gather360 Enteprise plan to use Azure Private Link.
  1. Azure Private Link allows Virtual Networks (VNets) and Azure-hosted or on-premises services to communicate with one another without exposing traffic to the public internet. Learn more in Microsoft's Azure Private Link documentation.
  2. Contact our support team and they will assit you with your Azure Private Link setup

Connect using SSH (TLS optional) (BETA)

gather360 connects to a separate server in your network that provides an SSH tunnel to your Azure Blob Storage container. You must connect through SSH if your container is in an inaccessible subnet on a virtual network.

To connect using SSH, create a firewall rule to allow access to your SSH tunnel server's IP address.

Before you proceed to the next step, you must follow our SSH connection instructions to give gather360 access to your SSH tunnel. If you want gather360 to tunnel SSH over TLS, follow Azure's TLS setup instructions to enforce a minimum TLS required version on your namespace.

Step 2 - Create a Shared Access Signature in Azure

  1. Open the Azure Portal.
  2. Select your storage account and click Shared access signature.
     select-sas
  3. Select Blob from the Allowed services options.
    create-sas
  4. Select Container and Object from the Allowed resource types options.
  5. Select Read and List from the Allowed permissions options.
  6. Choose the appropriate start and expiry dates of your SAS.
    IMPORTANT: When the SAS expires, you will have to update your Azure Blob Storage connector to resume syncing files.
  7. (Optional) To enhance security, safelist gather360's IP address range under Allowed IP addresses. Azure only allows one IP range per SAS token.
    IMPORTANT: Use the IP range format to safelist the IP addresses, for example, 35.234.176.144 - 35.234.176.151, because the CIDR format, for example, 35.234.176.144/29, is not supported in Azure Portal.
  8. Select HTTPS only from the Allowed protocols options. We recommend to select the HTTPS option to ensure the security of your files.
    create-sas
  9. Click Generate SAS and connection string.
  10. Make a note of the Connection string value. You need to enter this value in the Connection String field in the connector setup form.

Step 3 - Finish gather360 Configuration

  1. In the connect blob storage setup form on gather360 enter the Connection string.
  2. In the connet blob storage form on gather360 enter the container name.
  3. Click test connection. 
  4. If you have any further issues connecting to the service please reach out to our support team and they will be happy to help.

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