It's the line on a client's Microsoft 365 bill that nobody chose to put there: the SharePoint storage add-on. It shows up once a tenant spills past its pooled allowance, and from then on Microsoft charges roughly US$0.20 per gigabyte per month for the overflow, which works out around US$200 for every terabyte, every month, with no end date. What sits on that terabyte is almost never anything anyone touches, though. Finished project sites, the document library of a department that reorganised two years ago, exports somebody ran once and forgot, all of it cold and sitting on the most expensive storage tier Microsoft sells.
Most MSPs have made an uneasy peace with that line. It gets absorbed into a managed-services wrap, where it quietly eats the margin, or passed straight through at cost with the awkward "why has our bill gone up again" email that follows a few times a year. Telling the client to go and clean up after themselves is the other option, and it goes about as well as you'd expect, because nobody wants to be the person who deleted the file that later turns out to matter. So the line sits there, and everyone keeps paying it.
The reframe
That same line is a managed service waiting to be sold. Cold SharePoint data has no need to sit on Microsoft's premium tier. Moved out to object storage, the underlying storage comes in around twenty times cheaper per terabyte, and it can live in a region you pick.
Now, that twenty-times figure is the raw storage cost, not the client's final bill. Add the software that runs the archiving, and the margin you put on top, and the number the client actually pays is higher than bare storage. It's still well below what Microsoft was charging to hold the same cold data, though, and that is the point. The gap between Microsoft's overage rate and the real cost of parking cold files somewhere sensible is wide. How much of that gap you hand back to the client as a saving, and how much you keep as recurring margin, is yours to set. Most clients are happy to pay less than they were and never think about it again; you get a managed line that renews every month.
This is the job ArchiveBridge was built for. It's Cloud Ready Solutions' own product, so the mechanics are shaped around how an MSP actually works rather than bolted on afterwards.
How the model works across a book of clients
The number does the selling. Before anyone signs a thing, you run a free, read-only scan of the client's tenant. It reports the exact reclaimable volume and what that cold data is costing them in Microsoft overage, broken down by how far back you want to reach. Handing a client a real figure pulled from their own tenant is a very different conversation to quoting a generic saving off a slide.
After that it's one console for the whole book. Each client is a tenant under your account, walled off from the others, brought on with a single Microsoft admin-consent step instead of app registrations and pasted GUIDs. You choose which sites the policy looks at and how far back it reaches, so what moves is genuinely old content and nothing live gets touched. When an archived file is needed again, the person who wants it clicks the small link left in its place and the original comes back to where it was. A recurring policy re-scans and archives newly-aged files on the schedule you set, so this earns every month rather than being a migration you bill once and never again. Bringing files back isn't metered either, so retrieval never becomes an awkward line on anyone's statement.
The commercial side is deliberately left to you. What you charge each client is yours to set, and the margin between your cost and that price is the part you keep. It shows up on a per-client view rather than in a spreadsheet you maintain by hand.
Where it fits, and where it doesn't
A service you oversell comes back to you as a support ticket, so the limits are worth knowing. Files that are checked out, sitting under a retention policy, or on legal hold stay exactly where they are, untouched, so the things a compliance team cares about don't quietly disappear. Anything that does move is hashed and checked against its stored copy before the SharePoint original is removed, so nothing gets deleted that hasn't first been confirmed to exist elsewhere.
It covers SharePoint Online, not Exchange, Teams chat or OneDrive, and it isn't trying to be a records-management platform with retention schedules and disposition approvals. What it does is solve the storage-economics problem and verify its own work along the way. For clients who want tamper-proofing on top, archived copies can be made immutable on managed storage so a compromised admin account can't wipe them, but that is an opt-in on the right storage tier rather than something every account carries by default, so confirm it before it goes in a proposal.
For the clients it does fit, which is most mid-market M365 tenants carrying years of SharePoint, it turns a grudge line on their bill into something you get paid to manage.
The CRS part
Because ArchiveBridge is ours, there's no black box in the middle. We set the roadmap and the partner programme, the data can stay resident in Sydney for clients who care about that, and the same engineers who build it will sit on the first scan with you and help you frame the numbers for a client. It also fits alongside the object storage, file-access and cloud-enablement lines we already carry, so for a lot of partners it drops into a conversation they were having anyway.
If you'd like to have that conversation properly, come and talk to us about the partner programme. If you want the underlying problem laid out before the opportunity, the original storage-tax breakdown does that, and the SharePoint archiving solution page has the technical detail beneath all of it.