The Cold Tier Trap in Higher Ed: A Storage Reality Check

In higher ed, archived data is rarely truly archived. Someone needs last year’s files, a prior semester’s video, a research dataset, a compliance record, and they need it now, not in hours or days. When content lives across SharePoint sites, Teams, and departmental drives, it’s not always obvious what’s stored where. That’s why Microsoft’s recent storage changes hit education differently: the data keeps growing, and you can’t just freeze it and forget it.

What changed in Microsoft 365

Beginning August 2024, Microsoft made a big change for education tenants: schools now get one pooled storage allotment shared across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange. This includes 100 TB of free pooled storage, plus additional storage per paid user, depending on the subscription. The real-world impact of SharePoint and OneDrive growth pulling from the same pool means that when the pool gets tight, you either remove data or pay for more storage. That cost pressure tends to show up as a budget issue fast. While education is clearly impacted, these changes could affect other industries as well.

Why higher ed feels this faster than other sectors

Universities have unique storage needs compared to a typical business. You’ve got:

• research, datasets, lab exports

• recorded lectures and media libraries

• departmental shared drives that function as long-term archives

• compliance and retention requirements that make deletion risky

• thousands of users generating data and it’s hard to keep track of content constantly

This is what business as usual looks like on a campus: constant creation, long retention, and very little safe deletion.

This is also why cloud storage budgets get blown in education more than most places. Wasabi’s 2025 Cloud Storage Index analysis found 76% of education IT teams exceeded their cloud storage budgets in 2024.

The cold tier trap: Why it doesn’t match how higher ed actually works

When storage costs spike, the obvious move is to push older data into cold storage.

That can work if the data truly stays untouched. But higher ed doesn’t work that way. For universities, archive often means not used daily, not never used.

Wasabi’s Cloud Storage Index data for education makes this crystal clear:

• 89% of education respondents access their archived data at least monthly.

• 30% of educational institutions say business operations were negatively impacted by performance or data access delays when using cold storage tiers.

That’s the mismatch:

• Cold tiers look cheap because they assume you won’t touch the data

• Higher ed touches archived data monthly (or more)

• When retrieval is slow (or costly), it becomes an operations problem, not just a storage decision

So “cheap storage” can turn into fees, delays, and friction at the exact moment a university needs fast access for audits, research continuity, security response, or day-to-day work.

The realistic approach: Active archiving

This is where higher ed needs a different model: active archiving. With active archiving, you can:

• Move older, less-active content out of the expensive pool (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace)

• Keep it retained and accessible

• Keep costs predictable

• Avoid getting punished for retrieving your own data

You don’t have to delete everything, nor do you have to put it somewhere unusable. Active archiving is a middle path designed for the way universities actually operate.

Where CrashPlan + Wasabi fit

CrashPlan and Wasabi solve two halves of the same higher-ed problem: storage pressure inside Microsoft/Google and unpredictable costs and access outside it. Together, we let universities offload less-active SaaS data to predictable storage without paying a penalty every time they need to retrieve it.

CrashPlan helps relieve pressure on the Microsoft 365 storage pool

CrashPlan can move data out of Microsoft 365 (and Google Workspace) in a structured way so you can:

• reduce pooled storage usage without asking departments to purge everything

• keep data retained for policy/compliance needs

• restore or retrieve what you need when you need it

This is also where the human factor shows up: SharePoint and OneDrive become dumping grounds because nobody wants to be the person who deletes the wrong thing. CrashPlan helps you stop treating this like a forever cleanup project.

Wasabi makes the archive usable without the access tax

The archive destination matters because higher ed accesses archived data frequently (again: 89% monthly). So if your archive target charges extra every time you retrieve, search, or restore, you didn’t solve the cost problem; you just moved it.

Wasabi’s role in this combo is straightforward:

• predictable storage cost profile

• no gotcha penalty when you need the data back

• performance aligned to an archived-but-still-used reality

Spicy Bytes recap: CrashPlan at Fenway Park

We dug into all of this in our recent episode of Spicy Bytes, filmed at Fenway Park with CrashPlan’s Brian Gnos (Senior Manager, Sales Engineering) and Randy Demeno (VP, Business Development and Microsoft Practice).

What comes through clearly in the conversation:

• overages often show up as a finance surprise after a few billing cycles

• SharePoint/OneDrive growth is hard to control because deletion is risky

• archiving works best when it doesn’t create a new set of access fees and delays

• active archiving helps schools regain control without breaking workflows

Watch the episode

If Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace storage costs are turning into a recurring budget problem, this Spicy Bytes episode is the place to start. It’s the real-world version of what higher ed teams are dealing with right now, plus a clear path forward.