Microsoft’s SharePoint has become an indispensable tool for modern document management and collaboration among businesses worldwide, so much so that the platform now has over 200 million active users monthly, but you may already know that. What you may not have known is that these users add over 100 petabytes of data to SharePoint each month, and that’s not even considering the immense amount of data that AI adoption is expected to contribute.
Research suggests that the average human generates 1.7MB of data every second, and at current growth rates, there is over 200+ Zettabytes of data to be stored in cloud infrastructure by 2025. This will only be expedited with the launch of Microsoft Copilot and “machine-generated” data. With Copilot, it’s easy to create a 100-page slide deck with images and graphics and that doesn’t even touch on the versions of that file.
Now, the obvious solution is to buy more Azure storage, but we know it’s not that easy nor cheap. With a 1TB + 10GB per license data allocation on SharePoint Online, finding alternative storage is quickly becoming a nightmare for MSPs. Customers need more storage, while MSPs are tasked to find solutions without adding any cost.
What I’ve discovered from our customers, is that this is just a symptom of a much bigger underlying problem – a lack of a data lifecycle management strategy. The good news is though, solving this doesn’t involve buying additional SharePoint storage.
It’s critical to maximise existing storage and ensure that the production environment is maintained clean and uncluttered. It’s just like doing home spring cleaning. Get rid of all the redundant, trivial, obsolete data and archive data based on defined rules into lower storage tiers. While these archived data remain accessible, they do not consume expensive SharePoint storage space.
So as an MSP, why would you want to do this? Doesn’t it seem easier to just recommend buying more storage to your customers or implementing a catch-all rule to delete everything older than ten years?
In an increasingly competitive market, unique service offerings help MSPs attract and retain clients. MSPs are pivotal not only in service delivery, but in providing guidance to customers as to what they should or should not do and to look out for their best interests. After all, if customers could do it all by themselves, the MSP market wouldn’t even exist. Data lifecycle management is not a one-time service and customer priorities/requirements can often change, so MSPs need to be at the forefront and prepared.
MSPs can use solutions like AvePoint Opus, which can create automated lifecycle management policies across SharePoint and help move inactive content to archive storage for cost savings. This includes moving blobs and infrequently accessed data to lower-tier (and lower-cost) storage. So as your customers are saving about $26,000, you’d be setting your MSP business for greater value add, higher recurring revenues and a steady income stream by providing storage optimization solutions with ease – a win-win scenario.
Learn more about AvePoint Opus.
