Data is growing faster than even the world’s largest organizations can manage, and growing alongside it is IT spending. This explosive growth in unstructured data has led cloud storage vendors to adjust their pricing models and eliminate unlimited storage offerings, particularly for higher education institutions – leading many to think about how to minimize campus data.
Following similar moves by Box, Dropbox, and Google, Microsoft announced a pooled storage model for M365 Education, which goes into effect on August 1, 2024. After this date, M365 Education customers will receive 100TB of free pooled storage across Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with additional storage allotments per paid user based on their subscription.
Now that the era of unlimited storage for colleges and universities has ended, it’s time to optimize storage capacity through data minimization and continuous data management. For M365 Education customers preparing for the August 1 deadline, as well as institutions using any other cloud service, there are several benefits to storage reduction initiatives:
- Financial efficiency: By eliminating wasteful spending on unnecessary storage fees, IT departments can optimize their budget and free up funds for other critical initiatives, like data security and device upgrades.
- Risk mitigation: Optimizing storage reduces risk in addition to reducing storage costs. Institutions can enhance their security and eliminate potential vulnerabilities by continually eliminating stale data. This can prevent costly breaches and help protect the privacy of faculty, students, and alumni.
- Operational efficiency: Through optimal storage and data management practices, IT departments can better view their data and use these insights to streamline processes and improve campus IT service delivery.
Here are three ways to minimize campus data and optimize your institution’s cloud storage capacity:
Discover and Eliminate Stale Data
By implementing a data minimization strategy, you can ensure that you’re continuously discovering and removing redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) data. Use an unstructured data management tool to discover active users that store and share current, valuable data and know how much of your overall allotment is used for stale data or inactive users (as is often the case with alumni accounts). Understanding the age and value of your campus data can help uncover opportunities to purge unnecessary data and reduce overall storage capacity.
Migrate Cold-Tier Data to Archival Storage
Migrating infrequently accessed or modified data ( cold-tier data) to low-cost archival systems like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage can significantly reduce storage costs and capacity. This strategy can be beneficial for moving departmental content or research data that hasn’t been accessed in years. By moving such data to more cost-effective storage, organizations can save on storage repository expenses while still retaining essential data.
Control Data Growth with Continuous Management
Develop a data management strategy with policies to monitor and proactively act on unstructured data growth. By deploying a scalable, automated platform, you can continually execute these policies to reduce storage capacity and manage campus data as it grows and evolves – keeping costs down and eliminating the risk of exceeding your cloud storage allotment.
Minimizing Campus Data Storage is Key for IT Budget Efficiency
Effective data management is crucial to minimize the impact of unstructured data growth on higher education IT budgets in a world of increasingly restrictive storage limits. Implementing data minimization, file migration, and continuous data management strategies can significantly reduce storage costs while maximizing resource utilization.
Don’t wait until new storage limits kick in to start thinking about how you manage your data. DryvIQ’s unstructured data experts can help you discover and classify your campus data, then use those insights to create a strategy that optimizes storage utilization, reduces costs, and decreases risk. Contact us today to get started.
Want to learn more about how to get ready for Microsoft’s storage update? Check out our recommended plan to assess your current storage utilization and see how to stay agile with your campus data.
See How Indiana University Reduced Storage Costs Through Migration
Working with DryvIQ, Indiana University successfully migrated more than 3PB of data and 140,000 users to Microsoft Office 365 to cut costs after an increase by their previous cloud storage vendor. Read the entire case study here.
