Departmental billing for Microsoft 365 Backup is now available!
As organizations continue to scale Microsoft 365, protecting data has become a technical and operational requirement. Microsoft 365 Backup delivers fast, native recovery for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange—helping organizations respond quickly to accidental deletion, ransomware, and other disruptive events. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of departmental billing for Microsoft 365 Backup, a new admin capability designed to give organizations precise control over how backup protection is managed, administered, and billed across the business. Granular control over Microsoft 365 Backup As adoption grows, many customers have told us they need a better way to: Align backup costs to the teams that generate them Delegate backup management without giving up central control Support chargeback models across departments, regions, or business units Departmental billing directly addresses these needs by introducing granular scoping, role-based access, and flexible pay-as-you-go billing—all within Microsoft 365 Backup. Configure backup by department or scope Admins can now define backup policies for specific scopes, such as individual departments, geographic regions, subsidiaries, or teams. This ensures the right data is protected—without forcing a one-size-fits-all approach across the entire tenant. Assign role-based administration Using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), organizations can assign department-specific backup administrators. These admins can manage protection and recovery for their scoped areas, while central IT retains overall governance and visibility. Manage charges across Azure subscriptions Departmental billing enables pay-as-you-go billing across multiple Azure subscriptions, making it easier to map backup costs to the right cost centers. Resilience where it’s needed most Different parts of the organization have different risk profiles. Departmental billing allows teams to deliver backup protection that aligns to business criticality by allowing organization specific backup and cost management —without overprovisioning or unnecessary spend. Real-world scenarios Departmental billing unlocks a variety of use cases, including: Enterprises with multiple business units that prefer autonomous management of backup and costs Global organizations that need regional teams to manage their own protection policies IT leaders looking to scale Microsoft 365 Backup responsibly with financial transparency and budget controls for specific departments Additional news for Microsoft 365 Backup We’re continuing to invest in Microsoft 365 Backup to make protection and recovery simpler, faster, and more accessible. The newest addition to Microsoft 365 Backup’s feature lineup is its general availability for Government Cloud Customers (GCC). Other upcoming features include file-level restore and a streamlined billing experience, making robust data protection and recovery more accessible to public sector organizations. See a full breakdown of what’s new and stay tuned as we look ahead to the public preview of file-level archive. Resiliency in the era of AI As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, one question continues to come up at the executive level: If something disrupts your organization's data, how quickly can you recover? Learn how Microsoft 365 can help provide resiliency for the content that powers your organization’s AI initiatives. Get started If you’re already using Microsoft 365 Backup, you can begin configuring scoped backups and billing models today. If you’re evaluating backup solutions, this capability makes it easier than ever to align resilience with real-world organizational structures. To learn more: Explore Microsoft 365 Backup: https://aka.ms/M365Backup Learn how Microsoft approaches data resilience and governance across Microsoft 365. Learn how to set up Microsoft 365 Backup: https://aka.ms/M365Backup/Setup Watch our on-demand webinar to learn more about how Microsoft 365 Backup helps provide resiliency in the age of AI: https://aka.ms/M365Backup/Webinar/202603
Kantar reduces storage costs with Microsoft 365 Archive
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.
Manage and reduce storage growth in Microsoft 365 with Orchestry
Storage overages in Microsoft 365 rarely come from a single misstep or event —they build up quietly over time —version history accumulating in active libraries, inactive content lingering long after projects end, and legacy sites that were migrated as-is and never revisited. Because the growth is gradual, many organizations only notice the issue when a storage alert appears in the admin center.
