What is the big difference between SAS and ACS in Azure Authorization?

Question

I´ve done some "Googling" to figure out the big difference between SAS and ACS Azure Authorization strategy and I could not find something that really have convinced me. Could someone point me the best cenario when to use one or another and the differences between then? Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

SAS tokens are one of the authz capabilities that the Storage service exposes for delegating access to storage resources. You can delegate a subset of privileges to specific resources for a specific period of time. You can read more about it here. ACS is an access control capability that is available for many Azure workloads - but has not yet been integrated to support Storage. You can read more about ACS here.

Storage enables three main ways to restrict access to resources:

1. Storage account access keys
2. SAS Tokens
3. Blobs can also be configured to private access, public container or public blob.

There is also a good whitepaper on Security, Privacy and Compliance that you can find here.