96 VIEWPOINT Are you paying too much to store cold data? “ Organisations could be paying hundreds of thousands per year just on storing cold data” Organisations often spend significant chunks of money housing years-old data. By automatically archiving cold data to Microsoft Azure Blob, they can cut costs by up to 70 per cent Microsoft SharePoint Online has become a default home for enterprise content, and for good reason. It is easy to deploy and puts collaboration at the centre of how teams work. But as SharePoint usage grows naturally in a business over time, a lot of the data it houses is just being stored there for the long term, at full price. The customers I talk to highlight two factors making this a pressing issue. First, the migration away from on-premises SharePoint deployments has consolidated a lot of former SharePoint Server content into SharePoint Online, often in large migrations. Second, customers then discover their storage footprint is larger and older than expected. Across the environments we looked at, the average inactive-file rate in SharePoint Online runs above 60 per cent. 40 per cent or more of a customer’s monthly bill can come from data that is over one or two years old. Organisations could be paying hundreds of thousands per year just on storing cold data. This is not a knock on SharePoint. It’s great and does exactly what it is designed to do: keep active collaboration fast and centralised. Most organisations simply do not have a programmatic way to manage a file once it stops being active. This is where we can help. CTERA extends SharePoint using customers’ existing Microsoft Azure storage environment. Our CTERA Archiving Assistant scans every site, quantifying inactive data by age, file type and monthly cost in hours. You can then apply policy-driven rules that tier cold SharePoint data to the CTERA Intelligent Data Platform that is backed by lower-cost Azure Blob object storage tiers, leaving a shortcut link behind in SharePoint for users. Anyone who might need an old file can simply click the link and open it in our global file system. The result is that your data remains connected to Microsoft 365, stays governed and you can store it in your Azure environment at a fraction of the cost. Customers taking this approach can potentially cut inactive data costs by up to 70 per cent. Dylan Locsin is vice president of product marketing at CTERA CTERA Archiving Assistant scans for inactive data
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