Your Teams data increased – why and what can you do?

One of the biggest concerns for organizations in this day and age continues to be swelling data volumes, a subject that we’ve covered before. It’s especially relevant for organization which have transferred over to the Cloud, where they have to pay potential overflow fees if the data volume jumps over an acceptable limit. Now imagine your Microsoft Teams data has increased suddenly – what is causing the jump, how can you tell, and what can you do about it?

“Where did all this data come from?”

As an example, take an unnamed construction company. They use Microsoft Teams internally for their organization and communications. These communications were eventually split into multiple Teams, with a new Team being generated for new projects or tasks. Each Team would share a number of documents internally. Over time, this number of Teams and number of documents grows at an almost uncontrolled rate.

Once the company realizes they have a problem, it’s usually after the number of documents in SharePoint have reached a critical level; SharePoint charges a standard cost of 0.20 USD/GB in overflow fees after you’ve exhausted your given data allowance. This cost can mount rapidly over time, putting pressure on organizations.

At the same time – what can you do to solve this? In the above case, the documents shared are critical to their continued operation. The business in question cannot simply delete the documents and Teams permanently, even after the project is done – it is necessary to maintain the records of their completed projects. But keeping the information is proving catastrophically expensive.

First – identify the source of your data bloat

The first step in rectifying data bloat and overflow is to identify the precise source of your data that’s causing it to spike. Even if you know your Teams data increased, it is useful to know if this is due to documents or other file types, if there is one particular Team that’s causing the main issue, if it can be traced to a particular timeframe, or other information.

Fortunately, this is easy to discover. Using TECH-ARROW’s Storage Optimizer, a free storage analysis and optimization application, you can scan your Microsoft Teams and come away with a precise picture of what proportion of your data load comes from what source.

With that information, you can begin thinking about how best to tackle the issue going forward; the obvious answer is simply to remove some of the excess data, but as we’ve covered previously, this is not always a possibility. Critical communications necessary for your business continuity, documents covered by legal retention policies or regulatory mandates – all of these and more can prevent you from simply dumping the files in question.

Offload your data with contentACCESS

There is an easy and efficient way to solve these issues – offload your data into contentACCESS Archive and Backup. In addition to securely retaining your needed communications and files, archived information is more efficient storage and provides a number of advantageous features to further optimize your data storage.

In combination with the possibilities offered by Storage Optimizer, contentACCESS can immediately help reduce your dataload; remove needless versioning – the highest cause of clutter – store data in a cheaper solution, and save costs. At the same time, at no point do you lose access to your files! Access your archive anytime, anyplace through a variety of access points – our Outlook integration, Online Web Access, or our mobile app. Keep your data at your fingertips, cheaper and more efficient than ever.

Archive your data with contentACCESS

by Matúš Koronthály