Unit 2 roadmap — Implement and manage storage

What this unit is really testing

Unit 2 asks which mechanism grants this access, and which mechanism gets this data back. Those are the two families of question, and they are rarely mixed within one item. Answer the first by naming the credential and its blast radius; answer the second by naming what is actually recoverable and from what.

The order to work through it

1. Begin with access, because it is the largest and the most confusable: keys, signatures, stored policies, network rules, and identity-based access to file shares.
2. Then the account itself — how it is created, how it is replicated, and how it is encrypted. Settings here apply to everything inside it.
3. Finish with the data services, where the recovery features live: tiers, soft delete, snapshots, versioning and lifecycle rules.

Topic map

Every objective title below is quoted from Microsoft's skills-measured outline, as of 2026-04-17.

Configure access to storage

AZ104-U2.T1 · 5 objectives

• Configure Azure Storage firewalls and virtual networks
• Create and use shared access signature (SAS) tokens
• Configure stored access policies
• Manage access keys
• Configure identity-based access for Azure Files

Configure and manage storage accounts

AZ104-U2.T2 · 5 objectives

• Create and configure storage accounts
• Configure Azure Storage redundancy
• Configure object replication
• Configure storage account encryption
• Manage data by using Azure Storage Explorer and AzCopy

Configure Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage

AZ104-U2.T3 · 7 objectives

• Create and configure a file share in Azure Files
• Create and configure a container in Azure Blob Storage
• Configure storage tiers
• Configure soft delete for blobs and containers
• Configure snapshots and soft delete for Azure Files
• Configure blob lifecycle management
• Configure blob versioning

Traps

Check yourself

Are you ready to move on?

• You can state this unit's published range without looking it up.
• You can name every sub-area and say what separates it from its neighbours.
• You can explain each trap above to somebody else, in your own words.
• You have worked the unit's 76 bank questions and can say why the wrong options are wrong.

When all four are true, take a blueprint-weighted mock rather than more of this unit. A mock is the only asset here that tells you how this unit performs against the other four under time.