SharePoint Management
Drinks Manufacturer Significantly Reduces SharePoint Online Storage Costs
Executive Summary
One of the world’s largest wine and spirits sellers relies on Microsoft 365 for data management, with SharePoint Online as its primary document storage platform. As data volumes surged, the rising storage costs became a pressing concern for the company’s IT team. They needed a more cost-effective solution for storing both historical and current project data without compromising accessibility or recovery capabilities.
The answer was a SharePoint Online Archiving solution, which archives data to Azure Blob storage, providing a seamless, scalable, and affordable alternative.
The Challenges
The manufacturer required a robust cloud-based SaaS platform to manage and archive SharePoint Online data for over 20,000 users. Their key objectives were as follows:
- Curb Escalating Storage Costs: Reduce the mounting expenses associated with storing large volumes of data in SharePoint Online, while ensuring that archived data remained easily accessible and recoverable in cases of accidental or malicious deletion.
- Optimise Version Control: Implement effective version control to retain only the latest three file versions, preserving data relevance and minimising storage requirements.
- Easily Customise Policies by Unit and Region: Allow for granular yet simple, “set-it-and-forget-it” policy customisation across different business units and geographic locations, including the capability to store data in line with various data sovereignty mandates.
The Solution
After consultation with the drinks manufacturer, Essential recommended deploying a third-party SharePoint Online Archiving solution, which archives SharePoint data to Azure Blob storage. This solution provided both cost-saving benefits and powerful data recovery options, tailored specifically to the company’s needs.
Key features of the solution include:
- Control over data overage charges by archiving specific datasets to low-cost blob storage
- Automated and on-demand SharePoint archiving
- A seamless user experience, enabling rapid retrieval at an individual file level
- Multi version support, enabling you to define the number of versions to be retained
- Admin and End User portals for easy access to archived data
Success Criteria
The archiving solution offered several benefits, including:
Substantial Cost Savings
Based on the storage savings Essential has seen in other organisations, the company was able to gain significant storage savings by archiving data from SharePoint Online to Azure Blob storage. With growing data volumes, shifting to a more cost-effective solution became essential for long-term sustainability. See the financial ROI below >
By archiving 200TB of data from SharePoint Online to Azure Blob storage, the company achieved a 70% cost saving. Storing this volume of data in SharePoint Online would have cost £408,000 annually, compared to just £120,000 with the third-party archiving solution.
Simple Data Retrieval
Admins and end-users benefited from streamlined access to archived data, with powerful search capabilities and the ability to quickly recover data on demand.
This was further enhanced by the solution’s ability to restore individual files from small shortcuts (stubs), ensuring that end users across the company’s global business units could recover files without creating additional help desk workloads.
Granular Archiving Rules and Data Sovereignty
In addition to cost and operational efficiency, the solution provided granular control over archiving rules for different business units, allowing for tailored archiving policies.
For example, business-critical information, such as chemical measurements, needed to be excluded from version control policies. These sites required indefinite retention of data, necessitating granular control over versioning.
It also enabled the company to meet data sovereignty requirements, particularly for their units in the Caribbean, by allowing them to select the appropriate data storage locations based on local regulations.
Financial Impact and ROI Calculation
The drinks manufacturer currently archives 50TB of SharePoint Online data, with plans to expand to 200TB.
The financial benefits became immediately clear when comparing the cost of storing data in SharePoint Online versus archiving it with the third-party solution using Azure Blob storage.
Given their enterprise pricing with Microsoft, the cost of storing data in SharePoint Online is approximately £0.16–£0.18 per GB per month, equating to an annual expense ranging from £384,000 to £432,000 to store 200TB in SharePoint Online.
Using an average cost of £408,000, storing the equivalent in the third-party archiving solution, which costs £120,000, represents a saving of 70% compared to SharePoint Online storage costs.
Conclusion
This combination of cost savings, operational efficiency, and compliance with global data regulations made the third-party archiving solution an invaluable addition to the company’s overall data management strategy.
Additionally, the drinks company stands to achieve an ROI of 240% by switching to the third-party archiving solution, providing both immediate and long-term cost savings.
As the data volume grows, these savings and the return on investment will continue to increase, solidifying this as a scalable and financially prudent solution for the future.
