About the organisation
This government agency had expanded its use of SharePoint and Teams rapidly, driven by projects, departments, and short-term initiatives. The model worked well operationally, but over time it created a storage footprint that no longer reflected actual activity.
By the time storage was reviewed properly, the tenant had reached around 19TB, with usage spread unevenly across a large number of sites. Some were active and maintained. Others had quietly become dormant, with unclear ownership and no real lifecycle management.
The challenge
The issue wasn’t excessive usage - it was accumulated sprawl. Every Teams workspace introduced new SharePoint storage, and nothing was ever fully retired. Content remained indexed, permissions often remained unchanged, and storage continued to grow regardless of whether anyone still used the site.
This is a common government reality. Inactive sites don’t just consume storage - they also create governance problems, from stale access permissions related to potentially sensitive content to cluttered search results.
“The environment wasn’t out of control—it just wasn’t being actively managed anymore.”
Why SProbot
The organisation didn’t need more storage capacity. It needed clarity. Storage pressure in environments like this is usually a combination of factors:
- Version history quietly accumulating
- Deleted content still sitting in recycle bins
- Inactive or ownerless sites continuing to consume space
Well known best practices highlight how versioning and retention behaviour can significantly impact storage, especially when not actively governed. What was missing was a way to bring those patterns together and prioritise action.
What the team discovered
Excessive versions
The first clear opportunity was version history, which accounted for 1.2TB, equivalent to $2,880 in annual storage costs. This was trimmed using SProbot's large file reports.
Inactive files
But the more impactful finding was the amount of content that had simply aged out of relevance. Files last modified more than 5 years ago totalled up to 6TB across 1.8 million files.
Out of this large number:
- 4.8TB was archived to achieve $8,847 in annual savings
- 1.2TB was found to not have any relevance anymore and was deleted, reducing annual storage costs by another $2,880
These numbers reflect something most administrators already suspect: storage bloat is often less about active work and more about what never gets cleaned up afterwards.
Security
Alongside inactive content, the agency also found that there were many unexpected sites which had external sharing enabled. Not only that, but hundreds of sharing links were generated to external stakeholders without a proper process in place.
Sites in which guest users were found were scanned for sharing links, which were then reviewed and removed, restoring security to its correct state.
Orphaned sites are likely to be unwanted consumers
One of the underlying issues was ownership. Sites without clear owners tend to persist indefinitely. They are difficult to review, difficult to clean up, and rarely prioritised. Over time, they accumulate both storage cost and governance risk.
75 orphaned sites were found which did not yet trigger inactivity thresholds, but would eventually do so if left unattended. Of these, 34 were found to not be necessary anymore and were deleted, achieving ~8200GB in savings with a value of $1970.
Results
Total annual savings: $16 577
