How to save money (a lot of money) by archiving SharePoint Online data

Microsoft 365 customers are adopting OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. Many plans to migrate user directories into OneDrive, and departmental and corporate file shares into SharePoint.

In theory, this works fine. But there are a few problems in practice, such as:

• If you are a large enterprise with large amounts of data, you can overload the OneDrive for Business sync engine.
• Some of the unstructured data you are storing might not be the best fit for storing in Microsoft 365. For example, large video files, application data, or closed project archives.
• Finally, there is the issue of premium storage costs in SharePoint Online. Companies with more than 5TB in SPO are introduced to the monthly fees for storing additional data in SPO. Of course, you are welcome to store as much data in SPO as you need to – if you pay the premium storage costs – commonly referred to as “overages”. Storage beyond 5TB is going to cost more, and past 25TB you can add more storage in 25TB increments.

IT leaders are considering their options – looking to migrate less data into SharePoint Online, while keeping the data accessible to their users. They struggle to find a cloud-based solution that provides easy access to those older files. Plus, they need a solution to the ongoing issue of growing data in SharePoint.

Raising the value proposition of SharePoint Online backup

You can get the advantages of SharePoint Online without losing your shirt or sacrificing your data. The fix to avoiding high SharePoint Online storage prices is to keep less data in SharePoint by migrating less-active data into an intelligent online archive on a cloud that fully integrates with SharePoint.

For example: A Veritas customer with 43TB of data on file shares wanted to migrate the data to SharePoint Online. When they realized the cost due to premium storage pricing above 5TB, they explored the cost of running a SharePoint Server in AWS themselves – only to find that this was an even more expensive approach.

Instead, they turned to Veritas Alta™ SaaS Protection because it provides the ability to place older, less-accessed data in low-cost blob storage while enabling end-users to still easily access and search the content. Furthermore, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection backs up their SharePoint Online sites, providing quick and easy data recovery in the event it becomes necessary.

Instead of migrating all of their 43TB of file share data into SharePoint Online, the customer migrated 4TB to SharePoint – staying well below the premium storage price threshold. They archived the remaining 39TB to Veritas Alta SaaS Protection to create an intelligent archive in Microsoft Azure, where monthly storage costs are far lower. This allowed them to have full file access and governance in their archive. In the future, as users create new SharePoint Online data, the less-recently accessed data is automatically migrated to their Veritas Alta SaaS Protection archive – according to policies that they set – to avoid SharePoint Online storage overage charges.

Integrating SharePoint Online and Veritas Alta SaaS Protection

Veritas Alta SaaS Protection supports fully-integrated SharePoint Online backup and archive straight out of the box. Users work on active files in SharePoint Online’s collaborative environment, while Veritas Alta SaaS Protection automatically backs up the content and automatically archives less-active content to the Azure Blob Storage Archive tier.

The benefits are compelling:

• Lower cost. Comparing the cost of storing large archive data volumes between SharePoint Online and Veritas Alta SaaS Protection shows a huge difference. HubStor pricing is anywhere from 10% to 50% of the storage cost of SharePoint Online, depending on the data volume, redundancy requirements, and the specific storage tiers in use. For most customers, this cost savings is more than enough to cover the cost of their Veritas Alta SaaS Protection subscription, providing an immediate return on their investment.
  
• Keep archived data accessible. Just because data has been migrated to long-term archive storage doesn’t mean it’s forgotten; users may still need occasional access to the archived data. You have options on how your end-users access the archived data going forward:
  • Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can virtualize the data in Windows so users can continue using the interface they’re already used to. This also helps you avoid adding storage on-premises.
  • Additionally, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection includes a web user portal where end-users can browse, search, and access archived content through their browser.
  • Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can also create retrieval links on file shares and within OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online sites, giving users the ability to access or restore archived files from within Microsoft 365.
  • Veritas Alta SaaS Protection integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) and syncs security access control lists (ACLs) so your archives in your instance are automatically governed by the same authentication and authorization you’re already using in Microsoft 365.
    
• Preserve data value. Veritas Alta SaaS Protection’s administration portal allows IT to manage both their SharePoint Online data and data that’s been archived with Veritas. This includes the ability to configure policies to create automated rules for migrating data from SharePoint Online to the Veritas Alta SaaS Protection archive for compliance purposes. IT can also use legal holds, data retention, and data classification just like in SharePoint Online. Azure security settings minimize security risks. IT can simultaneously use Veritas Alta SaaS Protection to back up SharePoint Online and the rest of Microsoft 365 for added data protection.
  
• Advanced search capabilities. All content within Veritas Alta SaaS Protection is processed by its indexing service. This index enables blazingly-fast search results across multiple data sources from a single unified browser-based console.
  

SharePoint Online is great for user collaboration and sharing if you don’t let its high storage costs or overage charges sneak up on you. By archiving with Veritas Alta SaaS Protection, you can control SharePoint storage costs while adding data-aware intelligence and protection to your entire Microsoft 365 environment.

To learn more about Veritas Alta SaaS Protection’s archive and backup capabilities, you can learn more about the solution on our website, read our solution brief on optimizing your SharePoint Online storage costs, or get in touch with our team today!