The days of unlimited storage are gone. Microsoft is changing the way institutions are being charged for data in M365 Education.
Caps for storage will be introduced at 100TB per tenant plus a per-licence top-up, enforced as each institution reaches its next agreement renewal. You could be charged overage at $US300 per 10TB per month, or $US360,000 per annum per petabyte.
A real decision needs to be made today and not kicked down the road.
Institutions have four options:
If you are an educational institution that uses Microsoft M365 extensively, you need to get moving. M365 data is unmanaged and unknown; you don't know what you have.
Your teaching and learning materials, research data, datasets and outputs are valuable and irreplaceable knowledge that shouldn't be deleted or moved offline on a whim.
From your next renewal, Microsoft's pooled model will apply, and you will be billed for any capacity above your allocation. With ingress and egress capped at 400GB per hour, per tenant, shifting full petabyte at top speed will take about 105 days.
for every 1PB above your Microsoft allocation (overage).
to move 1PB at Microsoft's 400GB/hour throughput cap.
allocation reduction publicly confirmed by one university facing the new pooled model.
With over 25 years of experience in higher education data management, we understand the value of your data.
Mediaflux Connect 365 is built by Arcitecta on its data management platform Mediaflux, a single system that manages, catalogues, and governs data of any type, across any storage, built for billions of files and petabytes of data.
With Mediaflux Connect 365, all institutional data - including OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange and Teams - can be given visibility, a policy-driven deletion process, and clarity on its entitlement, regardless of how you choose to store it.
A single pane of glass for data you’ve collected for years. Make your files searchable for the first time with metadata from multiple sources – extracted automatically, AI-generated, and manually added. Recognise Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Intellectual Property (IP), and institutional assets with backup policies across your currently unmanaged data.
Deleting under storage pressure, without knowing which retention obligations apply, risks getting it wrong. With Mediaflux, retention classes are policy, not guesswork, with a full audit trail when disposal is authorised.
Deleting or moving too little leaves you paying overage. Moving everything wastes time against Microsoft's per tenant 400GB/hour throughput cap. Mediaflux Connect 365 analyses your data first – identifying what should stay, move, or be deleted – so only what genuinely needs to shift takes up the migration window.
Data can be moved to your own infrastructure (flash, object and tape) or any cloud storage. You choose the tier that fits your cost-per-terabyte and recall-time needs.