Kantar, a global leader in marketing data and analytics, is embracing Gen AI to save time, improve quality, and deliver better results to both employees and customers. After moving content to Microsoft 365 and rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot, Kantar faced increasing storage costs. By adopting Microsoft 365 Archive, Kantar has successfully reduced storage costs and improved data quality. Kantar also helped ensure Copilot could access clean, relevant information while keeping inactive data secure and cost-effective.
Transforming data management
With more than 30,000 employees across 90 countries, Kantar is one of the world’s leading marketing data and analytics companies. They specialize in a range of disciplines, including brand guidance, strategy, social media monitoring, advertising effectiveness, consumer and shopper behavior, design strategy, and public opinion. The success of Kantar’s solutions relies heavily on adopting and leveraging leading technology – particularly AI.
As part of their companywide initiative to embrace Gen AI, Kantar began rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot across the organization – helping employees save time, improve their quality of work, and deliver better results for their customers.
But properly adopting Copilot requires more than meets the eye. To help ensure accuracy in the content that Copilot produces, Kantar needed to equip Copilot with accurate data – which meant tidying up the data estate. To do so, Kantar began shutting down local file shares, network drives, and other non-strategic and duplicative storage solutions, and moving people to Microsoft 365 – enabling Copilot to ingest content and centralize key materials onto a single, secure platform. However, moving these files to Microsoft 365 increased storage costs – and also runs the risk of polluting Copilot and agent behaviors with outdated, cold, and/or stale data. Adopting Microsoft 365 Archive became the next essential step in Kantar’s Copilot and Microsoft 365 journey.
“Rolling out Copilot across our client service teams wasn’t just about enabling AI, it was about preparing the ground for it. We quickly realised that for Copilot to deliver meaningful insights and support collaboration, it needed clean, centralised, and relevant data. That meant rethinking our entire data estate, retiring legacy storage, and making tough decisions about what to keep, archive, or let go. It’s a challenge that forced us to align technology with trust, and strategy with scale.”
- Marilize Sage, Collaboration SME, Client & Colleague Experience
Lowering storage costs with Microsoft 365 Archive
Microsoft 365 Archive provides a cold data storage tier that enables Kantar to keep inactive or aging data within SharePoint at a lower price compared to standard SharePoint storage. As a result, this data retains Microsoft 365’s valuable security, compliance, search, and rich metadata capabilities at a cost-effective price point – all while helping ensure that Copilot is leveraging the newest and most accurate company information.
Using their own fully automated process, Kantar began using Microsoft 365 Archive to archive SharePoint sites and Microsoft Teams* connected to SharePoint. Every month, Kantar identifies sites that have been inactive for more than 6 months and sends automated emails to site owners informing them of their eligibility for archival. If the site owners don’t take action or they choose to ignore the emails, the sites are automatically archived. Of course, site owners can choose to keep a site live, even if the data is inactive. Kantar is also following this process for the deletion of archived sites.
“The rapid growth in occupied storage across the tenant created an urgent need to launch our site lifecycle management policy as quickly as possible. Adopting an agile approach, we introduced a minimum viable policy (MVP), which we iteratively improved over the following months—enhancing automation and refining communications.”
- Davide Ranchetti – Principal Engineering Manager, Digital Workspace
Realizing value at scale
Along the way Kantar learned that it’s important to deal with scale at a global organization. In addition, they’ve found it best to have an aggressive process with an opt-out approach.
To date, Kantar has archived more than 40,000 sites – nearly 100 terabytes of data, significantly cleaning their data estate and reducing storage costs.
“Microsoft 365 Archive helps us not only address storage costs, but also provide our end users the most up-to-date, relevant content across SharePoint, Teams, Copilot and Gen AI agents.”
- Davide Ranchetti – Principal Engineering Manager, Digital Workspace
“Feedback from end-users has been largely positive, with fewer than 1% of archived sites requiring reactivation.”
- Davide Ranchetti – Principal Engineering Manager, Digital Workspace
Looking ahead
Kantar is looking forward to using file-level archiving, when it becomes available in 2026. As a data and media company, they see a huge opportunity to save on storage costs when they can archive large, inactive video files.
“We have ambitious plans for 2026. Currently, we’re piloting file-level archival through a private preview, with the goal of rolling it out to all site owners next year. This will empower individuals to archive large or unused content, especially videos, more effectively.
Additionally, we aim to transition away from our custom-built process and adopt SharePoint Advanced Management to identify inactive sites and prompt site owners to archive them.”
- Davide Ranchetti – Principal Engineering Manager, Digital Workspace
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
*Microsoft Teams license required.
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