About the organisation
This financial services firm with ~2 500 employees had steadily expanded its Microsoft 365 footprint as part of a broader modernisation programme. Teams across compliance, finance, and operations had standardised on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams for collaboration, resulting in a rapidly growing volume of stored content.
By the time the IT team began investigating storage trends in detail, total consumption had reached approximately 65TB on a tenant with 70TB of assigned quota, with additional storage purchases already being considered.
Despite the scale of the environment, there was little clarity around what was actually driving this growth.
The challenge
The IT team knew storage costs were increasing, but they couldn’t clearly answer why.
At a high level, everything appeared healthy: sites were active, collaboration was taking place, and SharePoint was being widely adopted. But beneath the surface, several common problems were emerging:
- Versioning was enabled across most libraries, but its impact was unclear
- Older content accumulated freely, with no structured review process
- Large files had begun appearing in locations intended for collaboration
The difficulty wasn’t identifying that there was a problem - it was identifying where to start.
As the Director of IT operations summarised:
“We knew there had to be worthwhile savings in the environment, but we did not have the visibility to target them with confidence. We needed to understand where the waste actually sat before we made another storage decision.”
Why SProbot
Rather than launching a broad and unfocused cleanup project, the organisation implemented SProbot to gain a structured understanding of their environment.
The goal was not to remove data blindly, but to:
- Identify the largest and most impactful sources of storage consumption
- Separate valuable content from redundant, outdated, or trivial data
- Prioritise actions that would deliver the highest return on effort
Within a short period, the IT team had a clear picture of where storage was being consumed - and where it could be reduced safely.
What they uncovered
The most significant finding was not immediately visible from standard reporting tools.
Across the tenant, version history accounted for more than 12TB of storage.
Files that were actively used - financial models, reporting packs, and operational documents - had accumulated hundreds of versions over time. In many cases, these historical versions were no longer required but continued to consume space.
While versioning remained important for compliance purposes, it had silently become one of the largest drivers of cost.
Content not suitable for SharePoint
In addition to version-related waste, the IT team also identified a second category of storage inefficiency:
Content that should never have been stored in SharePoint in the first place.
These files were typically large, infrequently accessed, and provided little collaboration value. Examples included:
- Outlook PST archives uploaded for backup purposes
- Exported market data files from legacy systems
- Large offline reporting datasets
These types of files are better suited to cheaper, alternative storage platforms.
By identifying and removing or relocating this content, the team freed up 1.6TB of space, equivalent to approximately $3,993 in annual savings.
The opportunity in inactive content
While versioning and inappropriate files were important, a large opportunity lay in inactive content.
Using SProbot’s insights, the team found that a substantial portion of the tenant consisted of files that had not been accessed or updated in years.
Instead of treating all inactive data the same, they took a more nuanced approach:
Archiving valuable inactive content
Most inactive files still had potential business value - whether for compliance, audit, or historical reference.
Rather than deleting these files, they were moved to archive storage tiers, reducing their cost footprint significantly.
This approach delivered:
- 75% cost reduction on archived data
- Preservation of content where required
🔗See also: Calculate your potential archive savings
Deleting unnecessary inactive content
A smaller subset of inactive data had no ongoing value.
This included:
- Temporary working files
- Duplicated content
- Outdated datasets
Where appropriate, this data was permanently removed, delivering full cost savings.
The approach
The organisation avoided a risky “big bang” cleanup. Instead, they focused on:
- Prioritising high-impact sites first
- Reviewing storage drivers such as versioning and inactivity
- Applying targeted actions in the form of version trimming, archiving, and deletion of low-value content
This enabled them to reduce storage steadily without disrupting business operations.
Results
The impact of this structured approach was both immediate and measurable.
Total annual savings: $47 309
With an investment of ~$16 000 in SProbot, the initial phase of the project represented a net investment, but one that delivered:
- Immediate cost reduction
- Long-term cost control
- Improved visibility for future optimisation
