Office 365 customers are taking the plunge into OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online (SPO). Many plan to migrate user directories into OneDrive, and departmental and corporate file shares into SPO.

In theory, this works fine. But a few problems are common, such as:

• If you are a large enterprise with large amounts of old data, you can overload the OneDrive for Business sync engine.
• Perhaps some of the unstructured data you are storing is not a good fit for storing in Office 365. For example, large video files, application data, or closed project archives.
• Finally, there is the issue of premium storage costs in SPO. 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 premium storage costs. Storage beyond 5TB is going to run you $0.19/GB/month in SPO.

IT leaders are considering not migrating as much data into SPO. But they struggle to find a cloud-based solution that provides easy access to those older files. Plus, there must be a solution to the ongoing issue of growing data in SPO.

Raising the Value Proposition

You can get the advantages of SharePoint Online without losing your shirt or sacrificing your data. The fix is to store less data in SPO to avoid high storage prices, and place your less active data into an intelligent online archive on the same cloud that fully integrates with SPO.

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

Instead, they turned to HubStor because it unlocked the ability to place older data in low-cost blob storage while enabling end-users to easily access and search the content on a self-service basis. Furthermore, HubStor serves to backup their SPO sites, and archive old sites so that the storage demand in SPO stays lean and mean.

ESG Solution Showcase: Office 365 Users Should Check Out HubStor

The net result: Instead of migrating the entire 43TB file share data scope into SPO, they migrated 4TB to stay well below premium storage prices. They archived the remaining 39TB to HubStor, their intelligent archive in Microsoft Azure, where monthly storage costs are less and they have full file access and governance features in the archive. As users create new data in SPO, aging data automatically migrates to the archive store to avoid SPO above-the-limit storage costs.

Integrating SharePoint Online and HubStor

HubStor supports SharePoint Online out-of-the-box for fully integrated archive and backup. Users work on active files in SharePoint Online’s collaborative environment, and HubStor serves to backup this content while automatically archiving less active content to Azure blob storage. The benefits are compelling.

• Lower cost. Comparing costs of storing large archive data volumes between SharePoint Online and HubStor is night and day. HubStor pricing is anywhere under a half to a tenth of the storage cost of SharePoint Online, depending on the data volume, redundancy requirements, and storage tiers in use.
• Keep archived data accessible. Archived data doesn’t freeze in long-term archive storage. You have options on how your end-users can access archives going forward. HubStor can virtualize the data in Windows Server so that users do not have to learn a different interface and you can avoid growing storage demands on-premises. Or, HubStor includes a Web user portal where end-users can browse, search, and access archived content. There is also the ability for HubStor to create retrieval links that can start on file shares and work in OneDrive for Business or SPO sites, giving users the option to access or restore archived files from within Office 365. HubStor works with Azure AD and syncs security ACLs so that your archives on low-cost Azure blob storage are governed with the same authentication and authorization as Office 365.
• Preserve data value. HubStor’s self-service administration portal allows IT to manage both their SPO and HubStor archived data, including setting policy-driven migration rules from SPO to the archive. They can also use litigation holds, retention, and data classification just like they can in SharePoint Online. Azure security settings minimize security risks, and IT can use HubStor to backup Office 365 and SharePoint Online for added data protection.

SharePoint Online is great for user collaboration and sharing if you don’t let its high storage costs sneak up on you. By going with HubStor, you can control SPO costs while adding data-aware intelligence and protection to your entire Office 365 environment.

To learn more, download the ESG Solution Showcase: Office 365 Users Should Check Out HubStor.