Microsoft has absolutely lost their mind with their future pooled storage quotas for Microsoft 365 for Education customers

Posted by meatwad75892@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 302 comments

Not sure how many people have seen this news, but a few months ago, Microsoft announced a new pooled storage model for Microsoft 365 for Education customers. Long story short, 100TB to start for everyone, and then 50 GB per A3 license purchased, or 100GB per A5 license purchased. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/education-blog/program-updates-in-microsoft-365-for-education/bc-p/3946777#M1262 The rub here is that education customers get a chunk of student use benefit licenses at no cost, but these users **do not contribute to pooled storage.** This drives the average amount of storage available for everyone way, way down to unacceptable levels. Let's say you're an organization that purchases 4,000 A3 for Faculty licenses. Let's say you have 20,000 students. That would give you a 300TB pooled storage quota that is shared across Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. That means Microsoft is only giving an **average** of **12.5GB** for everything they need to store in their Exchange mailbox and personal OneDrive, plus any usage they would put into Teams/SharePoint sites and shared Exchange mailboxes/resources. We've already churned through our data, and even if we deleted 100% of our high-volume users' data, we would still be over the future allotment. Bumping up to A5 would less than double that average. Beyond that, Microsoft will be happy to sell 10TB storage packs at $300 per month. (Mind you, a lot of organizations stand to be many multiples of this amount over quota.. Need 50TB? "That's $18,000 per year, please!") I understand Microsoft is probably banking on low/non-usage users to balance things out for the higher capacity users, but let's be frank -- This amount of storage is not even close to sufficient for the business, teaching, and research functions of a large university. If you haven't seen this announcement yet and it affects you -- Better start planning and reaching out to your Microsoft reps sooner than later.