The line item nobody looks at
Open a Microsoft 365 bill for any organisation past the 300-seat mark and scroll down. There is almost always a SharePoint storage add-on sitting there, quietly growing. Microsoft charges around US$0.20 per GB per month once you exceed your tenant quota. That works out to roughly AUD $328 per terabyte per month, every month, forever, for data that in most cases nobody has opened in years.
A terabyte of cold SharePoint data costs about the same as a mid-range laptop, annually, to sit there doing nothing.
That is the problem ArchiveBridge exists to solve. But before we get into how it works, we should answer a more useful question: who actually needs it? Because not every Microsoft 365 tenant does.
Who benefits from Microsoft 365 archiving
In our experience, the organisations that get real value from ArchiveBridge fall into a few recognisable patterns.
Professional services firms with legal retention obligations. Law firms, accountants, engineering consultancies and financial advisers all have to keep closed-matter files for seven years or longer. Almost none of it is touched after the matter closes, but deletion is not an option. A 500-seat firm we modelled recently was about to purchase another block of SharePoint storage just to hold matters from 2019. That is exactly the wrong buying decision.
Organisations with a long tail of finished project sites. Construction, architecture, government contracting, marketing agencies. Every project spins up a SharePoint site, fills it with tender responses, drawings, photos and PDFs, then goes quiet. Multiply that by a few hundred projects and the tenant quota disappears.
Any tenant with a growing ex-staff OneDrive graveyard. When someone leaves, their OneDrive often gets converted to shared storage and forgotten. It counts against quota indefinitely.
MSPs managing multiple Microsoft 365 tenants. This one is different. MSPs benefit not because they own the storage bill, but because archiving is a service they can bill for. More on that below.
Who probably doesn't need it
We would rather tell you when a product isn't for you than sell it to the wrong customer. If your tenant is comfortably under quota, if your data is genuinely hot and accessed regularly, or if you are a small business with a few hundred gigabytes of SharePoint content, ArchiveBridge is not going to save you meaningful money. The economics start working somewhere north of one to two terabytes of cold data.
How the archive actually works
The part every IT manager asks about first is deletion. Reasonably so. Nobody wants a tool that removes SharePoint files and then discovers the copy failed.
ArchiveBridge processes every file in a strict order that never varies:
- Download the file from SharePoint
- Compute a SHA-256 hash of the content
- Upload to your S3-compatible bucket
- Verify the stored copy's hash matches the original byte-for-byte
- Only then delete the SharePoint copy
- Leave a clickable restore stub where the file used to be
Nothing is deleted until the copy is proven identical. Every action goes into an append-only audit log you can export. If a file has unique permissions, is checked out, or has a retention lock, it routes to a manual review queue instead of being archived silently. Microsoft Purview retention labels, litigation holds and eDiscovery holds are detected automatically and excluded from archiving entirely. Those files never get touched.
The storage economics
This is where the numbers get interesting. That same terabyte of cold data, moved to Wasabi object storage in Sydney or Melbourne, costs around AUD $16 per month. Roughly 20 times cheaper than the Microsoft SharePoint add-on, with no egress fees when you retrieve your own data.
The important design decision here: ArchiveBridge never marks up your storage. You bring your own bucket, your own keys, your own region. Wasabi is the default and what we recommend for Australian data residency, but AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2 and MinIO all work too. If you already have a preferred object store, use it.
Run the maths on a 5TB cold archive: about $1,640 per month on Microsoft, versus about $80 per month on Wasabi. That is roughly $18,700 a year back in the budget, recurring.
Where MSPs come in
ArchiveBridge is built multi-tenant from the ground up. There is a proper n-level account tree, so a distributor sits above an MSP, which sits above its customers, and billing rolls up that tree rather than sitting flat. Onboarding a new customer is a one-click Microsoft admin consent flow. No GUID pasting, no per-tenant app registration, no back-and-forth.
The part MSPs tend to appreciate most is the inline cost, charge and margin table. You see the underlying storage cost per client, the price you charge that client, and the margin, on one screen. No back-calculating from a spreadsheet.
And because a policy continuously re-scans tenants and auto-archives newly-qualifying cold files, this is a recurring managed service, not a one-shot migration project. Every month more data ages into the cold category and gets moved automatically.
How it fits with the rest of the stack
A question we get often: how does archiving differ from backup?
Different jobs entirely. Keepit backs up Microsoft 365 so you can recover from ransomware, malicious deletion or accidental loss. ArchiveBridge moves cold production data out of SharePoint to cut storage cost. You want both. One protects the data that matters; the other stops you paying premium prices to store data that doesn't.
For customers already running UFSConnect or Gladinet CentreStack for drive-letter access to SharePoint, ArchiveBridge stub notes can reference the CentreStack portal URL, so archived files stay reachable through the same drive mapping staff already use. Users don't have to learn a new interface to retrieve old files.
The free scan
Before committing to anything, ArchiveBridge runs a read-only scan of the tenant using a least-privilege Entra consent. It returns the exact reclaimable gigabytes and the dollar figure attached to them. No write permissions granted at that stage, nothing modified.
If the number is small, walk away. If it is large, you have the business case sitting in front of you.
Getting started
If you manage a Microsoft 365 tenant with a growing storage add-on, or if you are an MSP looking for a recurring service to add to your Microsoft 365 practice, get in touch with the CRS team about a read-only ArchiveBridge scan. We would rather show you the number first and let you decide whether the maths works for your environment.