Cloud storage limit for Microsoft 365 for Education customers

I've written on this topic a couple of times recently and engaged in a number of lively discussions about the topic. One of the huge benefits of aligning multiple organisations onto a single tenant is that it brings about significant improvements in security and governance. As a result of Microsoft's announcement to limit storage to 100 terabytes per tenant, organisations are now considering various solutions to work around this limitation. A couple of these creative solutions appear, at first glance, to be a perfect fit; however, all is not as it first appears. I have been working with our implementation partner, Cloud Design Box, on our project to migrate multiple schools within the foundation into a single tenant, and it made sense to ask them for their thoughts on the subject. This is what they found when they built a replica site structure to ascertain the suitability of some of these alternatives:

The multi-tenant organisation seems quite interesting. After setting it up, it created the same cross-tenant sync as expected, but we discovered a few limitations, very similar to the ones experienced previously when implementing B2B.

Here are the key findings from the tests:

• News doesn’t sync across tenants. So, if a user is on one tenant’s homepage, they won’t see any trusted news or other relevant news from a different tenant.
• Document search doesn’t work across tenants.
• The multi-tenant organisation supports a maximum of five tenants.
• Links to people in your organisation may not work for users from another tenant if their account was originally a guest and they had previously accessed SharePoint resources.
• It might take up to seven days for a user to appear in search once they’ve been synchronised.
• Teachers across multiple schools in classes won't work automatically.
• The user accounts are still set up as external in identity.
• B2B has its advantages, and it’s definitely a better option than enabling external sharing and adopting a Wild West approach to access control. It could be a good short-term solution if the five tenant limit isn’t an issue. However, the best approach is to be in one tenant and take steps to mitigate storage usage and communication with certain users using Information Barriers and policies.

In tandem with this work, I also had discussions with Microsoft on the subject of pooled storage limitations and strategies that can be implemented to ensure the future longevity of any single tenant organisations. The guidance at the moment is to be mindful of the upcoming changes and be prepared to react accordingly when situations change. It is highly likely that the advent of Microsoft backup and archive will offer alternative methods of storage, but this technology is not on general release yet. When it does become readily available, it will be accompanied by a charge mechanism where data moves from offline to online, and these charges could become prohibitive. The more sensible and pragmatic approach is for organisations to take control of their data and actively review their usage along with their storage and retention policies. The seemingly free access to unlimited storage is what is precipitating the issue, and in order to move away from this mindset, the way in which organisations store data needs to change. The environment cannot sustain the ongoing impact of unlimited storage use, and the costs associated with providing online storage also conspire against its ongoing perpetual incremental growth and use.

After a fair degree of due diligence, our immediate course of action is to be aware of the impending changes that are coming and to consider what alternatives are available and could be implemented to address our storage needs as the organisation grows. Based on current predictions, there will be sufficient storage available to support the needs of the organisation as long as its usage is accompanied by a change in the way in which documents are stored and also the duration for which the documents are stored. As a contingency and in preference to purchasing additional storage from M365, we shall be exploring the use of Azure storage for any cases that present us as candidates for its use. Likely to be long-term offline retention of archived data that does not need to be immediately available online.

I'd like to give a shout out to Cloud Design Box for their ongoing support and also for their contribution to this article. If you are looking for a technical implementation partner to help you with accelerating the implementation of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint across your educational organisation, then I highly commend them to you.