On January 27, 2025, Microsoft will institute a major change for organizations with OneDrive. According to the new policy, organizations will begin paying for the storage of unlicensed OneDrive accounts. While this step benefits Microsoft in terms of better management of cloud resources, it also entails that the businesses adapt their way of working with data to avoid unplanned costs.
What Does This Mean for Organizations?
Previously, organizations didn't have to take any action if a user account was no longer licensed and the data remained in OneDrive. The data would remain available, but an organization wasn't charged for storing unlicensed accounts. Beginning in January 2025, however, Microsoft will charge for unlicensed accounts; thus, all data still residing in an unlicensed account count toward the overall storage quota.
Why Is Microsoft Making This Change?
This is not a one-time thing for Microsoft, which has been on a cleaning spree to organize its cloud storage and manage resources better. By charging for unlicensed OneDrive accounts, the company is making sure that only active licensed users consume the storage. It would also free up resources for the licensed users and make sure cloud storage is used effectively.
Another intention of this policy shift is also to have better data management practices within organizations. While Microsoft charges for unutilized or unauthorized accounts, it's incentivizing businesses to clean up their systems, remove a lot of garbage that's there, and, basically, stay on top of account management.
How Does an Organization Prepare?
Organizations can avoid these additional charges by taking a few steps in advance of the deadline, January 2025:
User Account Review: Ensure that all user accounts are current and licensed. Identify unlicensed accounts storing data and license those accounts or remove them.
Audit Data Storage: Review all data stored in OneDrive. Are there files no longer required to be retained? Do any users' data remain in unlicensed accounts? Cleaning up unnecessary data will help reduce overall storage usage and avoid unnecessary fees.
Account deactivation processes may be defined as documenting a procedure that considers deactivating or archiving those users who are no longer active in these accounts. Verify whether account management and clean-up procedures exist when an employee leaves the organization and should no longer have access to OneDrive.
Consider Backup and Archiving Solutions: Any important data which does not need to remain in OneDrive but needs to be retained, consider backup or archiving solutions which store this data. In this way, it can avoid unnecessary storage costs but still keep your important files accessible.
Storage Monitoring: Pay attention to the storage quotas and usage measurements from Microsoft. Set up notifications so that when organizations are near their limits, they will be warned, thus taking care of growth in storage consumption.
What Happens After January 2025?
Once the policy goes into effect, unlicensed OneDrive accounts with stored data will incur additional costs. If an account remains unlicensed for a prolonged period, Microsoft may restrict access to the data until a valid license is applied, leading to potential disruptions. Organizations that fail to act could end up facing significant costs for data that could have been avoided through proper account management.
Rer : Microsoft Learn
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