Co-authored by Ben Stott and Kelly Mathurin of the Jisc Cloud team.
A major benefit of being a customer of the Microsoft 365 Education suite has for a long time been having access to unlimited storage across OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange. This has meant that IT administrators haven’t needed to worry about capacity planning, storage quotas or the lifecycle of data across these services. Users have been free to store large amounts of files and data in M365 for as long as they wanted and without restriction or a financial impact.
Microsoft is now making changes to the storage offering however, and Education customers renewing their M365 contracts after 1st August 2024 will find that unlimited storage has been replaced by 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange with an additional 50GB of pooled storage for each paid A3 user license and an additional 100GB of pooled storage for each paid A5 user license. Further storage can be purchased on top of this to increase the total pooled storage available to your organisation.
While this change may seem disappointing, it’s worth bearing in mind that Microsoft have good reasons. The freedom to just add more and more data to cloud storage without considering data management strategies can lead to the risk of losing control over your information and potential data leaks or breaches. Additionally, stored files, whether in use or not, ultimately use datacenter resources that have an impact on Microsoft’s carbon footprint which Microsoft has a very public commitment to reducing.
So now that we understand what change is happening, how should education customers respond? The first step is to do an assessment of your M365 storage usage including the quantity and the types of data it is being used for. Storage in M365 is best suited to frequent access or short-term storage of small files and for user collaboration on those files. To be more specific, OneDrive is great for users to store documents they are working on and share them with a small number of people for collaboration, whereas SharePoint should be used to store files that would need to be accessed or worked on by a larger number of users, and Exchange storage is for our Outlook mailboxes and not recommended for file storage.
Next, consider what policies your organisation might need going forward to manage your data. This will include thinking about how much storage users should be allocated, how long data should be kept in M365, and the processes for removing or archiving data no longer relevant or needed. This will raise the question of what to do with data that is no longer suited to storage in Microsoft 365 but that which you cannot simply delete. This is where alternative cloud storage solutions that are designed for other uses come into play. such as those for large files and datasets, less frequently accessed files, or for long term archiving. The following table gives some examples of what type of cloud storage you might choose to move your data to and includes example costs as of writing.
| Data Use | Recommended Azure Service | Estimated Azure Monthly Cost (Examples based on 10TB in UK South region without redundancy) | Recommended AWS Service | Estimated AWS Monthly Cost (Examples based on 10TB in UK South region) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frequently accessed with low latency by multiple users and groups such as data for analysing or making publicly available | Azure Blob Hot | £156.72 | Amazon S3 Standard | £180.00 |
| Data that is accessed less frequently but still requires quick access such as large datasets and historical records | Azure Blob Cool | £95.32 | Amazon S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) | £100.00 |
| Data that is rarely accessed but needs to be preserved, such as raw research data or data that needs to be retained for compliance reasons | Azure Blob Archive | £15.91 (excluding retrieval costs) | Amazon S3 Glacier | £14.00 – £39.00 (based on how quickly the data is to be retrieved) |
| Transaction-heavy data files with lots of users such as those for application backends or sharing through SMB or NFS | Azure Transaction Optimized Files | £534.27 | Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP | £470.53 (inc multi-AZ, 20% SSD storage. Back-up, read/write is an additional cost) |
| Archived data and data that is accessed less frequently but still requires quick access using SMB or NFS | Azure Files Cool | £234.63 | Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP | £470.53 (inc multi-AZ, 20% SSD storage. Back-up, read/write is an additional cost) |
| Media for analysing, converting or streaming | Azure Media Services | (Varies depending on service processed) | AWS Elemental Media Services | (Varies depending on service processed) |
| Databases for specialised compute workloads requiring high transaction rates over iSCSI such as a Learning Management System (LMS) | Elastic SAN | £752.78 | Amazon Storage Gateway Or Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP | £268.01 (plus outbound data transfer charges) |
| Data Lake workloads | OneLake | £242.88 (Varies depending on SKU) | Amazon S3 used in conjunction with other AWS services | £180 (plus additional dependent on the other services) |
If you would like more information on mitigating this pricing change or would like some help with a specific cloud issue then please contact us at cloud@jisc.ac.uk.