A SharePoint migration at Ergobaby led to rising costs
To reduce costs, Ergobaby had migrated all of its data from a third-party file service to SharePoint Online over the past few years. That solution worked, initially. But it also meant that SharePoint became the home for everything: marketing campaigns, product photography, promotional videos, presentations. They also retained files that may no longer be used but must be kept in case someone does need them.
The user licenses for cloud storage in SharePoint included 3 TB, and Ergobaby had to purchase 9 TB of additional file share storage. Storage costs had reached approximately $21,000 per year.
The internal process was manual and painful. IT went through a labor-intensive tagging exercise, identified cold files, manually copied them to Azure Blob Storage, and then deleted them from SharePoint. The process worked technically, but it created a new operational burden. When users, typically from the marketing team, needed an archived file, they had to submit a ticket to IT to locate the file. The IT team manually restored the file to SharePoint. Resolving these tickets required manual effort from the IT team and created operational overhead for what was intended to be a cost-saving archiving workflow.
The marketing team, which accounted for about 80% of SharePoint's storage usage, could not agree to the permanent deletion of the files. Videos and photos that had not been touched in years were kept because the team might need these someday. The IT team knew the files would maybe never be accessed again but had no way to archive them without either breaking access or generating an administrative headache every time someone needed archived files.
Why Ergobaby was interested in ShArc
Ken Hayes, Senior Director of IT at Ergobaby, had followed ShArc since its product announcement. The concept resonated immediately: it reminded him of an older system that replaced email attachments with lightweight pointers while being stored in a significantly cheaper storage solution. When he saw ShArc applying the same logic to SharePoint, he recognized it as a direct fit for the problem the team was living with.
The requirement was straightforward: archive cold data out of SharePoint, keep it accessible to end users without IT involvement, and keep it entirely within Ergobaby’s own Azure environment. For Ergobaby, it was critical that archived data remained within Ergobaby's own Azure environment and that existing SharePoint permissions continued to apply. The team had no interest in solutions that would scatter files across external systems or require ongoing IT intervention for every restore.
ShArc addressed each of these requirements. Competing approaches would have required:
-
purchasing more SharePoint storage (not sustainable)
-
migrating to a third-party archiving platform (complex and risky)
-
continuing the manual Azure copy-and-delete process (operationally expensive)
ShArc offered a different path: keep files visible in SharePoint through stub files, move the actual data to Azure Blob Storage within Ergobaby’s own tenant, and let users restore with a click in a few seconds.
"The ability to transparently redirect a user to Azure Blob Storage was very attractive."
Ken Hayes | Senior Director, IT at Ergobaby
Automated archiving, one-click restoring and no IT tickets
ShArc works by replacing inactive files in SharePoint with lightweight .sharc stub files: placeholders that look and behave like normal SharePoint entries. The original file is moved to Azure Blob Storage within Ergobaby’s own Azure tenant. When users need a file, they click on it in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive. The file is loaded back from Azure Blob Storage, replacing the stub file, and becomes available as a fully functional document.
No ticket. No IT involvement. No broken links.
For Ergobaby, the configuration was simple. The IT team offloaded files through ShArc's offloading interface. Since nothing changed for end users, they needed no additional training. Today they still access all data as usual and can restore archived files with one click. Through ShArc’s policy interface, the team can define automated archiving rules based on file size, age, or type.
Permissions are preserved end-to-end through Entra ID integration. When a file is restored, it returns with the same access controls that were set before archiving. An accounting folder accessible only to finance will remain inaccessible to everyone else, whether archived or live. Metadata is also fully retained throughout the cycle.
From the moment of installing ShArc, Ergobaby had already archived 6 TB of data during the first 2 weeks. The setup and onboarding process, supported by the ShArc team, took about two hours and went extremely smoothly for both sides.
What changed since Ergobaby started working with ShArc
Beyond the cost reduction, operational savings are equally significant. The previous process of manual tagging, bulk copying to Azure Blob Storage, and file-by-file restoration on every ticket consumed IT time that could have been redirected. ShArc replaced that entire workflow with a largely automated system. Offload and restore operations that required hours of IT effort became a matter of clicks, and end users can restore their own archived files without raising a support request.
Version bloat, a secondary storage driver identified by Ergobaby and the ShArc team, is also addressed directly. ShArc removes excess file versions during the offload process, which had previously required a separate, contentious exercise with the marketing team to manually trim versioning settings. Administrators have full control over how many versions are deleted during archiving, thanks to ShArc's version retention feature.
The future of smart archiving
From now on, Ergobaby will be able to invest the time previously spent on manual data archiving and restoration in other projects. In addition, ShArc has also freed up budget for these projects.
The IT team is already looking forward to new features that will further streamline internal processes and IT operations, and they are eager to hear news and updates from the ShArc team.
