Dentsu strengthens its governance with Microsoft 365 Archive
Dentsu, a global leader in media and creative services, faced mounting challenges in managing the exponential growth of digital assets across its organization. With creativity and collaboration at the heart of its business, Dentsu’s worldwide teams generate vast quantities of content daily, resulting in more than 2 petabytes of data stored in SharePoint. This rapid expansion led to escalating storage costs, operational complexity, and productivity concerns. By adopting Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits, Dentsu achieved significant cost savings and strengthened its governance, security, and AI readiness, helping position the organization for future growth and innovation. Expanding digital footprint Operating in approximately 120 countries, Dentsu combines the talents of its global network of leadership brands to deliver impactful and innovative growth solutions for clients, providing a range of services including advertising, public relations, media planning and buying, content creation, data analysis, and digital marketing. The company is recognized for its commitment to innovation, leveraging technology and creativity to drive end-to-end experience transformation across Media, Customer Experience Management (CXM), and Creative services. With more than 68,000 people in Dentsu’s global network, Dentsu’s digital footprint experienced rapid growth, leading to the complexity of its data management. Storage costs for SharePoint climbed, putting pressure on budgets and prompting the need for a more sustainable solution. The proliferation of content made it increasingly difficult for teams to locate the right files, with outdated materials surfacing alongside current ones and slowing down workflows. This content sprawl also impacted the effectiveness of AI-powered tools like Microsoft Copilot, which struggled to distinguish between relevant and obsolete information. As an organization known for its creativity and its ability to scale its creativity across an expanding number of channels, leveraging Copilot to accelerate planning and production workflows, has become an essential part of the business. And essential to using Copilot is maintaining the quality and relevance of the data it pulls from. “We're building an AI-ready organization, and data quality is fundamental to that vision,” said Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms, Dentsu International. “As Microsoft Copilot adoption accelerates across our business, the distinction between relevant and outdated content becomes critical.” Attempts to address these issues with external blob storage solutions only added layers of complexity. Exporting content outside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem created tracking challenges, complicated governance, and introduced friction for users needing to access archived materials. Legacy infrastructure and oversharing risks further compounded the problem, making it clear that a new approach was needed to reduce costs, simplify operations, and maintain compliance. “Through this process, we learned the importance of addressing data sprawl early as waiting compounds the problem. Unchecked content growth not only increases costs, it also creates cascading challenges across governance, security, and productivity. Legacy files with poor permissions become security liabilities, while outdated content clutters search results and undermines AI effectiveness.” - Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms Transforming storage consumption with Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits Dentsu embraced Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits as part of its cloud-first strategy. Microsoft 365 Archive provides a cold data storage tier that enables Dentsu to keep inactive or aging content – and its rich metadata – within SharePoint at a lower price compared to standard SharePoint storage. Version history limits allow admins and site owners to control how versions are stored in a SharePoint document library or OneDrive account. The Dentsu team is working with business units across the organization on this initiative. “Our analysis reveals a common pattern across our large collaboration sites, typically only 10% to 20% of stored files remain actively used, while the rest accumulates over time,” said Mellars. For example, they recently worked with a business unit whose SharePoint site was nearing the 25-terabyte storage limit. To not impact the active site, they used a site-level archive approach which involves creating a new site, migrating inactive content, and then archiving the new site. The team successfully reduced the business unit’s active storage footprint from 25 terabytes to just 2 terabytes. By transitioning from hybrid blob storage to native archiving within Microsoft 365, Dentsu can keep all content secure, compliant, and easily accessible. This move eliminated the need for complex integrations and fragmented storage tiers, simplifying management and improving the experience for Dentsu employees. “Microsoft 365 Archive delivered what we needed, a cost-effective archiving solution that keeps content within our core Microsoft 365 environment. The operational simplification alone has been significant. One platform, one set of policies, one user experience.” - Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms The solution also supported Dentsu’s broader transformation goals, including AI enablement. By archiving outdated content and maintaining data quality, Dentsu is ensuring that both end users and Microsoft Copilot can work with current, accurate information. Automation played a key role, with the organization piloting SharePoint Advanced Management and its site lifecycle management features to proactively identify and archive inactive sites based on usage patterns and business rules. This shift from manual reviews to automated policies saves time and scales better. “Our archiving strategy ensures AI tools and end users alike work with current, accurate information. Legacy content remains preserved and accessible, but it no longer clutters search results or dilutes the effectiveness of our intelligent tools. With Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits, we're controlling costs, improving user experience, and creating the data foundation our AI strategy requires.” - Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms Delivering financial savings and environmental benefits Dentsu found success by treating Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits as a strategic initiative, not just cost reduction. And the impact has been substantial. Dentsu has significantly lowered expenses, cutting SharePoint storage costs by 72%. The organization strengthened its security and compliance posture by reducing the attack surface associated with oversharing and legacy data. These efforts also helped Dentsu with its sustainability goals, as a smaller digital footprint leads to lower energy consumption and a more environmentally friendly approach to data management. “We've learned that efficiency and sustainability are complementary, not competing. Reducing our storage footprint with Microsoft 365 Archive and version history limits has delivered both financial savings and environmental benefits through lower energy consumption, proof that smarter data management serves multiple business objectives at once.” - Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms In addition, operational efficiency improved dramatically, with users able to restore archived content seamlessly and work in an environment optimized for productivity and AI-driven capabilities. Looking ahead Dentsu is eagerly anticipating the introduction of file-level archiving in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams* connected to SharePoint, which will allow the organization to target inactive content more precisely at the individual file level, rather than managing entire sites. Dentsu’s preliminary assessments indicate they could achieve storage reductions of 50% or more across their largest sites. “With file-level archiving, we'll be able to archive content more efficiently, without the overhead of site creation and bulk migration. This targeted approach will enable us to maintain optimal performance in our active collaboration spaces while ensuring long-term content remains accessible and compliant.” - Axel Mellars, Head of Collaboration Platforms Dentsu is also seeing promising early results from piloting SharePoint Advanced Management and its site lifecycle management features, laying the foundation for ongoing data governance and sustainable growth through automated policies that identify and archive inactive sites based on usage patterns and business rules. This can help them proactively address content sprawl, reduce administrative overhead, and scale sustainably as the organization grows. In addition, Dentsu is looking forward to the next phase of optimization. They’re evaluating the re-ingestion of their legacy blob storage content back into Microsoft 365. This would allow them to consolidate their entire content lifecycle within a single, unified platform – simplifying management, strengthening compliance, and ensuring consistent access across all their historical data. “It's the logical evolution of our cloud-first strategy, leveraging native Microsoft 365 capabilities to their fullest potential,” said Mellars. For more information about the latest Microsoft 365 Archive news check out our Microsoft Ignite blog and learn how to get started with Microsoft 3565 Archive. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. *Microsoft Teams license required.
