ArchiveBridge vs Microsoft 365 Archive: Who Actually Owns Your Cold SharePoint Data?

Open your Microsoft invoice and find the SharePoint storage overage. That number is growing every quarter, and most of what it’s paying for hasn’t been opened in years — old project folders, finished tenders, superseded design files, exported reports nobody reads. Digital dust.

Microsoft’s answer is Microsoft 365 Archive: a cold tier that discounts the per-GB rate on archived SharePoint sites. It’s a real reduction, and if all you want is a cheaper Microsoft bill it does something. But look closely at what it doesn’t change. The data is still Microsoft’s to price. You still pay per GB, every month, forever. And when you need a file back, you don’t pull a file — you reactivate an entire site, wait for it to rehydrate, and pay a reactivation fee on the way out.

ArchiveBridge takes the opposite view: cold data shouldn’t live in a premium platform at all. Move it out to storage you own and control, and the storage-tax problem stops being a discount negotiation and becomes a solved cost.

This is the whole comparison in one sentence: Microsoft 365 Archive makes cold data a cheaper part of your Microsoft bill; ArchiveBridge takes cold data off your Microsoft bill.

The economics only really separate when you follow the money on both sides:

• The rate. SharePoint storage add-on / overage runs around AUD $0.20/GB/month. Object storage on Wasabi is roughly AUD $0.01–$0.016/GB/month — about 20x cheaper. Microsoft 365 Archive discounts its rate, but it’s discounting from the Microsoft baseline, not from object-storage economics.
• The illustration. One terabyte of cold data is approximately $204.80/month at the SharePoint add-on rate. The same terabyte on object storage is approximately $10/month. (Approximate, for illustration — your exact figure comes from a scan.)
• Who owns it. With ArchiveBridge the file lands in your bucket, under your keys, in your region. “Your own bucket, your own keys, your region — ArchiveBridge never marks up storage.” With Microsoft 365 Archive, it’s still sitting in Microsoft’s estate under Microsoft’s pricing.
• The exit. Wasabi charges no egress fees, so reading archived data back is free. Microsoft 365 Archive charges a per-GB reactivation fee to bring a site back to active. The tool that’s meant to save you money on cold data shouldn’t bill you to look at it.

The restore model is where the day-to-day pain shows up.

Microsoft 365 Archive archives at the site level. To read something that’s been archived, you reactivate the whole site. That triggers a rehydration process that can take hours, and it applies a per-GB reactivation charge. If a partner rings your service desk asking for one file out of an archived project site, “we’ll have it back in a few hours and it’ll cost us to pull the site” is a poor answer.

ArchiveBridge works at the file level and leaves a forwarding address. “Every file leaves a forwarding address.” Where the file used to be, there’s a clickable restore stub. The end user clicks it, and self-service restore pulls the file from object storage, re-verifies its SHA-256 hash, re-uploads it to the exact original SharePoint path, and removes the stub. No site reactivation, no rehydration queue, no reactivation fee, no IT ticket.

For customers who also run UFSConnect / CentreStack as a cloud file server, ArchiveBridge stub notes reference the customer’s CentreStack portal URL and drive letter, so archived files stay reachable straight from the mapped drive.

The reason people hesitate to delete cold data is fear — delete the wrong thing and you’re restoring from backup or explaining yourself to compliance. ArchiveBridge is built around removing that fear, in a fixed order every time:

1. Download the file from SharePoint. 2. Hash it with SHA-256. 3. Upload to your object storage. 4. Verify the stored copy’s hash matches the original. 5. Only then delete the SharePoint original, leaving the restore stub.

Nothing is deleted that hasn’t been proven byte-for-byte identical in its new home first.

The compliance guardrails matter as much as the hashing. ArchiveBridge automatically detects Microsoft Purview retention labels, litigation holds and eDiscovery holds and excludes them — anything under hold is quarantined and never touched. Each archived file carries a permission snapshot captured at archive time. Every action — scan, copy, verify, delete, stub, skip — is written to a full append-only, exportable audit log. Files with unique permissions or that are checked-out or retention-locked route to a manual-review queue rather than being archived blindly. Because Microsoft 365 Archive is native, Purview holds apply to it automatically too — the difference is that ArchiveBridge gives you that record independently, in an audit log you control.

Microsoft 365 Archive is a per-tenant setting. As an MSP you configure it inside each customer’s admin centre, one at a time, and there’s no revenue in it for you — it just lowers your customer’s Microsoft bill.

ArchiveBridge is built MSP-first, and it’s a margin product:

• True multi-tenancy. An n-level account tree (distributor → MSP → customer), not a flat MSP-to-tenant list. Billing rolls up the tree.
• Set your own margin. An inline cost / charge / margin billing table lets you set your storage margin per client and see it on one screen — no spreadsheet back-calc.
• White-label. Per-client branding across the portal.
• One-click onboarding. A Keepit-style Microsoft admin-consent flow — no GUID pasting, no per-tenant app registration.
• Every deal is also a storage deal. Because ArchiveBridge points at your own bucket, every deployment is a Wasabi opportunity too — storage margin plus tool margin.

See the wider MSP surfaces on MSP platforms and the partner programme.

ArchiveBridge is Cloud Ready Solutions’ own product — built by the CRS team, not a third-party vendor we resell. That means we control the roadmap, the pricing and the partner programme, and support is Australian.

Getting a real number is deliberately low-friction. You grant a read-only Microsoft Entra app (Sites.Read.All only) and the free self-service scan returns your exact reclaimable GB and dollar figure in minutes — no sales call, nothing moved. It’s two-stage least-privilege consent: the read-only scan app first, then a separate write-access app only if you decide to archive. Both are visible in your own Entra admin centre.

From there CRS supplies:

• The tool, priced per terabyte archived (volume-based, not per seat), in early access with no long lock-in.
• The storage layer via Wasabi — Sydney and Melbourne regions for Australian data residency, no egress fees — or your own AWS / Backblaze / R2 bucket if you prefer.
• Local AU support and the partner programme for MSPs.

A note on backup: if you also run Keepit for Microsoft 365 backup, keep it. Keepit is backup — recovery from loss or ransomware. ArchiveBridge is archive — cutting storage cost by moving cold data out. Different jobs, and they work together.