I have spent twenty-plus years helping organisations squeeze maximum value from Microsoft ecosystems. I’ve held many roles across multiple service providers at an executive level, and I’ve worked directly for software vendors to get experience “on the other side of the fence”.
One of these vendors was AvePoint. During my stint at AvePoint I consulted to Service Providers with the hope they’d innovate and meet the needs of their customers more proactively. I spoke with more than three hundred service providers and IT leaders in 2023, about one quietly ruinous topic: SharePoint storage creep. In almost every workshop people waved off the problem with typical MSP excuses like “we can’t keep going cap in hand to our customers”, and “we don’t understand this stuff enough and don’t have time to train our staff so we can’t take this on”.
I joined alltasksIT at the start of 2024 because John Koziaris, the founder and owner of the organisation shares the same vision and passion I did for great customer outcomes. alltasksIT knows that storage optimisation is not a one-click archive, nor a line item the finance team can simply cancel.
Done well it is part economics, part information governance and part change management. The good news? Modern tools and disciplined process make the payoff immediate: lower Azure bills, faster search, happier users and tighter compliance. This guide distils what we have learnt so you can sidestep the traps and capture the savings.
This article discusses the need for storage optimisation through a “let’s save you money” lens. There’s a conversation to be had about the Records Management part of this platform and discussion, but for now, let’s talk about saving you money!
Microsoft gives every tenant 1 TB of SharePoint Online space plus 10 GB per licensed user. That sounded infinite when Office 365 launched; today, a single Teams meeting recording can chew 1 GB. Throw in Planner attachments, Power BI exports, looped video drafts, and suddenly even a 50-seat firm edges toward the limit. Extra capacity costs about A$3 000 per terabyte per year. Ignore the trend long enough and you will pay more for storage than for the your Microsoft 365 licences that created the content in the first place.
Microsoft reports overall tenant data is doubling every 18–24 months.
Video alone now represents 40 % of fresh SharePoint storage consumption.
Power Automate and Copilot generate thousands of new versions per file, inflating libraries by factors of ten.
Archiving looks like an obvious fix, yet “archive everything older than three years” seldom survives first contact with reality. Legal hold, audit, eDiscovery, user expectation and regulatory mandates can derail a blunt retention policy overnight. The real craft lies in forecasting deltas, mapping retrieval needs and balancing compliance against cost.
A continuous practice that classifies, relocates or defensibly deletes content so that high-value data sits in premium Microsoft storage and low-value or inactive data moves to cheaper tiers or exits entirely.
The sequence a document follows from creation through active collaboration, reference, archive and, finally, destruction. A mature lifecycle links retention rules, metadata and automated actions to cut human error and regulatory risk.
The transfer of content from the primary SharePoint site collection to a secondary repository, often Azure Blob Cool or a third-party vault, while preserving metadata, permissions and legal integrity. Archiving is not deletion; it should let users recall or restore items when required.
Picture a professional services firm with 200 staff. They receive 600 GB of customer uploads each month and store final project deliverables “just in case”. At current run-rate they will breach the included quota in nine months, triggering an extra A$36 000 annually, a silent, compounding tax.
Now imagine a state-government agency subject to the Public Records Act 1973 and VERS mandates in Victoria. They cannot simply purge aged SharePoint libraries; every deletion must be defensible and documented. Archive workflows must honour legislative access times and hold schedules or the agency risks legal penalties.
Whether you are a five-person dental clinic or a 5,000-seat utility, ignoring growth is no longer viable. The question is how to optimise, not if.
Archiving dormant libraries to Azure Cool tier or AvePoint Opus can slice the effective per-terabyte price by 50 % or more. Our clients regularly save A$1 500 per TB every year.
Reducing library size improves crawl times, search relevancy and, by extension, Copilot responses. Users stop wading through ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial) files.
Lifecycle rules apply holds to records, auto-delete trivial copies, and classify sensitive data for encryption—protecting against breaches and non-compliance fines.
Purging 10 TB of stale content saves roughly 3 400 kg CO₂e per annum in storage energy, shrinking the organisation’s digital carbon footprint.
Delta confusion – Archiving 1 TB of site data does not equal 1 TB saved; version history may push deltas back into primary storage.
Growth forecasting – Teams, Viva Engage and Loop generate unpredictable spikes; linear trend lines break quickly.
User retrieval – If historical proposal PDFs now live in a cold tier, how will sales reps restore them mid-flight?
Legislative overlap – Public Records Office of Victoria, State Records NSW and OAIC retention orders sometimes conflict.
Automation risk – A mis-configured policy can wipe critical evidence days before litigation hold is applied.
Run AvePoint Opus Discovery across every site, team and OneDrive. Flag ROT, sensitive information types, inactive libraries and external-sharing hotspots.
Project three-year deltas per site based on real usage, not guesswork. An internal comms team might grow 5 % per month, while video archives explode 25 %.
Map Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS), PROV standards, ISO 16175 and internal policies. Apply separate retention labels for financial records, HR files and transient chat.
Pilot policies on a subset of sites, review user retrieval logs, then widen scope. Always keep rollback paths for mistakenly archived data.
Set quarterly optimisation KPIs: net TB saved, files remediated, search latency change, cost avoided. Feed results back into policy tuning.
|
Tenant size |
Included quota |
Typical monthly growth |
Archive trigger |
Ideal cold tier |
Hot tier projection after 36 mths |
Savings with AvePoint Opus* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
< 50 users |
1 TB + 500 GB |
50 GB |
75 % utilisation |
Azure Cool |
2 TB |
A$3 000 |
|
50–400 |
6 TB |
150 GB |
70 % |
Opus + Blob |
12 TB |
A$18 000 |
|
400–2 000 |
22 TB |
400 GB |
65 % |
Opus Tiered |
36 TB |
A$45 000 |
|
2 000–5 000 |
55 TB |
1 TB |
60 % |
Opus + Glacier |
90 TB |
A$135 000 |
Great question, it’s nice and easy to understand your data with AvePoint Opus, Discovery. Let start by looking at the screenshot below.
In this example, a customer has 5Tb of SharePoint storage, that represents, to all intents and purposes, a typical alltasksIT customer. What you’re seeing here is an interactive platform that helps you model how much money you can save. The highlights are;
There at 1.5 million files in SharePoint for this customer. That’s A LOT! It’s not just the financial burden carried, it’s potential for business interuptions with OneDrive/SharePoint File Sync. At worst, file corruption is a possibility here
There is 1Tb of version history across those 1.5 million files. Microsoft, by default, stores up to 500 versions of any file produced in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. That 150Mb powerpoint presentation you’ve modified 100 times? That’s not 1Tb or more of version history (not exactly, but you get the point we are trying to make here). If you identify this early, that’s $3,000 of savings anually you can make just by tuning down document version history to something more reasonable, let’s say, 50 versions.
Then there’s inactive files, we know this particular tenant has a lot of data that’s not been touched in over 24 months, we just don’t know where it is. AvePoint Opus Discovery & Analysis helps with at least identifying the “how much” part of this conversation. Licensing the Store and Optimise component gets you the “What” part of the answers you need.
On that last point, here’s a visual of showign files not touched in more than 24 months? How is an organisation supposed to find relevent, active information about their organisation if they have 66% of their files inactive.
Then there is ROT data. Once you understand your potential waste by file count and size, you can get a little deeper on what. think about the screenshot below, maybe someone accidentally stored Season one through seven of Game of Thrones on OneDrive, and that’s most of the storage being consumed. You might look at this screenshot when you license the product and think “I didn’t realise we had so many videos!” or “Ok, we don’t need every PDF or music file ever created since we founded the business 30 years ago. Again, for $30Tb/Month you can really start to understand where you save money.
The business case for AvePoint Opus becomes really obvious with the $30/tb/month price point – dip your toe in the water and see how much you have. Then, when you know you can save $15,000 a year on SharePoint costs, procure the archiving capability of the product and get saving!.
Microsoft’s native tools, Insights, Storage Metrics, lifecycle labels, provide the building blocks, but stitching them into a holistic programme takes scarce skills. Many MSPs I spoke with in 2023 struggled to operationalise Opus: policies sat in “draft”, audits ran once, and dashboards gathered dust.
At alltasksIT we embedded optimisation into our Managed Modern Work practice. Engineers who once reset passwords now wield Opus policy packs, run quarterly storage reviews, and brief compliance officers on PROV alignment. The result is a repeatable, auditable workflow you can hand to auditors without breaking sweat.
|
Platform |
Best suited to … |
Key strengths |
Watch-outs |
|---|---|---|---|
|
AvePoint Opus |
Tenants above 2 TB needing AI-driven classification and VERS compliance |
Tiered storage, auto-classification, Victorian certification, SaaS delivery |
Requires admin consent, policy tuning vital |
|
Microsoft Purview + Archive |
Licence E5 tenants under 10 TB |
Native labels, no extra vendor, integrated search |
Cold storage still billed at Azure rates, limited metadata carry-over |
|
Third-party WASABI + Rclone |
Backup-heavy orgs on tight budgets |
Flat US$6 TB/month, object lock, global region choice |
DIY scripting, no SharePoint-aware restore, Australian data residency extra |
Launch AvePoint Storage Calculator for your tenant.
Archive one pilot site (e.g. completed 2023 projects) to Cool tier.
Measure live library size, search return speed and Azure bill shift over 30 days.
For as little as A$30 per terabyte per month you can audit growth drivers, and from A$1 500 per terabyte you can cut real spend by half—often paying for the project inside a quarter.
The Storage Calculator is a really great place to start! We know this because our Chief Customer Officer was pivotal in the design and implementation of the calculator. You can save yourself a click by seeing how easy the calculator is to interact with, below.
I spent years inside AvePoint teaching partners the mechanics of Opus. Many could click “create policy”; few could align lifecycle, cost and compliance across departments. At alltasksIT we built that competence in-house, training service desk techs to read retention schedules, coaching consultants on PROV nuance, and embedding dashboards into our EOS scorecards. We do more than fix printers—we consult first, optimise continuously, and prove the savings on your Azure invoice.
Book a 60-minute discovery call.
Identify three storage-heavy sites—marketing, video archives, legacy project docs.
Run a 30-day Opus proof-of-concept with our engineering support.
Compare Azure bill, search speed and compliance posture.
Decide whether to scale the policy globally or refine thresholds.
Move from storage chaos to controlled, compliant efficiency—and make every Microsoft 365 dollar count.
Chief Customer Officer
Mark Boyd is a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), plays a key executive role responsible for overseeing the entire customer experience within alltasksIT. The CCO serves as the voice of the customer at the highest levels of the company, ensuring that customer-centric strategies are developed and implemented across all departments.
