Introduction
Every few months, the same conversation occurs in IT departments worldwide. Someone from finance pulls up the Microsoft invoice, points to the storage line item, and asks: “Why is this number still going up?”
The honest answer is usually the same: because nothing is ever deleted, nothing is ever moved, and the data just keeps accumulating.
The Storage Equation Nobody Fully Reads
Microsoft 365’s storage model seems generous at first glance. Every tenant receives 1 TB of SharePoint storage by default, plus 10 GB of storage for every licensed user. A company with 1,000 users has 11 TB included in its existing subscription.
But once you exceed that cap, additional storage costs approximately $0.20 per GB per month. That sounds manageable — until you do the math at scale.
| Overage Volume | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
| 10 TB | ~$2,000 | ~$24,000 |
| 50 TB | ~$10,000 | ~$120,000 |
| 100 TB | ~$19,500 | ~$234,000 |
For most mid-to-large enterprises, 50–100 TB of overage is not unusual, and it’s almost entirely made up of content no one is actively using: old project files, archived campaigns, superseded policies, legacy reports. Premium storage, paying premium prices, for content that is essentially dormant.
The Compliance Trap: You Can’t Just Delete It
Here’s where the problem compounds. The instinctive response to runaway storage is to delete old content. But in most regulated environments, that’s not an option. Compliance frameworks — GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, FINRA, ISO 27001, and dozens of sector-specific regulations — impose retention obligations stretching from five to fifteen years or longer. Deleting content, even content no one has touched in years, can create audit risk and regulatory findings.
So organizations find themselves in the Data Hoarding Paradox: legally required to retain content they cannot justify storing at premium prices.
Why “Buy More Storage” Is the Wrong Answer
The path of least resistance is to buy more SharePoint storage. But this approach has compounding problems:
- More storage doesn’t make content more searchable, more auditable, or better governed. It doesn’t address compliance.
- Buying more storage removes every incentive to manage the content lifecycle. It rewards inaction.
- Data volumes grow, accumulation rates increase, and the invoice climbs faster every year. The cost curve accelerates.
How Netwoven Helps: Discovery & Business Case
Before a single file is archived, the most important work is understanding the problem. Netwoven’s engagement begins with a structured discovery and assessment phase that gives organizations the data they need to build a compelling internal business case
Phase 1: Storage Assessment & Business Case Development
- Tenant-wide storage analysis: Netwoven conducts a comprehensive scan of your Microsoft 365 tenant to identify storage volumes, growth rates, file age distributions, and inactive content pools by site and department.
- Cost modelling: Using your current overage costs and projected growth, Netwoven builds a detailed ROI model showing exactly how much you can save. Typically 75%+ on excess storage costs and over what timeframe.
- Compliance mapping: Netwoven’s compliance specialists review your existing retention policies (HR, Finance, Legal, and more) and identify gaps before archival configuration begins.
- Stakeholder presentation support: Netwoven helps you build the business case for leadership, translating technical storage data into financial impact terms that resonate with Finance and Legal decision-makers.
- Jumpstart offer: Netwoven offers a structured jumpstart engagement to accelerate discovery and get you to a decision-ready position in days, not months.
Four Real-World Scenarios Where This Changes the Math
Scenario 1: The Post-Project Graveyard
A professional services firm completes dozens of projects per year. Each generates significant file volume like proposals, working documents, design assets. Once a project closes, this content sits untouched but consumes SharePoint storage indefinitely. A policy archiving closed-project sites 90 days after completion can dramatically reduce active storage with zero user impact.
Scenario 2: The HR Document Archive
HR teams retain sensitive documents like offer letters, performance reviews, contracts — for 7–10 years depending on jurisdiction. Most of this content is never accessed after initial filing. Moving it to archive storage under a department-specific retention policy preserves compliance while cutting costs significantly.
Scenario 3: The Legacy SharePoint Migration
Many organizations carry years of legacy content from older SharePoint versions or migration projects such as sites migrated “as-is” and never cleaned up. This content often represents the single largest pool of archivable data in a tenant. Netwoven’s bulk archival capability can process up to 5 TB of legacy data in a focused engagement, reclaiming significant storage capacity almost immediately.
Scenario 4: Finance Department at Year-End
Finance teams generate high-volume content during audit periods like reports, reconciliations, board materials. After the audit closes, most enter a retention-only phase. Archiving it automatically at year-end keeps it accessible for future audits while freeing premium storage for current-year work.
What Organizations Actually Need
The insight that unlocks a better answer is this: not all data deserves the same storage tier. A contract currently in negotiation is fundamentally different from one signed seven years ago. Both need to be retained. But they don’t both need to live in premium-tier SharePoint storage.
What organizations need is a way to:
- Identify content based on age, department, activity, or policy criteria
- Move it to lower-cost storage automatically without breaking access or permissions
- Retain it fully for compliance purposes
- Restore it on demand when someone actually needs it again
That’s the core promise of a policy-driven archival framework. It’s exactly what Netwoven’s SharePoint Online Archive solution delivers. It changes the storage conversation from “how do we afford to keep everything?” to “how do we store everything intelligently?”
If you have any query contact us and we will be happy to assist you.
Next in this series: Blog 2 — Inside the Archival Engine: How It Works, Department by Department
