In today’s digital workplace, collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint have become the backbone of business operations. SharePoint enables organizations to store, share, and manage documents across teams and departments, making information accessible and workflows more efficient.
However, as enterprises increasingly rely on SharePoint, a silent issue is driving costs higher than many organizations anticipate: cold data.
Cold data refers to information that is rarely or never, if ever, accessed. It often includes:
While these data may no longer play an active role in daily operations, they continue to occupy valuable storage space within SharePoint.
Microsoft 365 provides a baseline allocation of storage for SharePoint Online. Once this allocation is exceeded, organizations must purchase additional storage at premium rates.
For large enterprises with terabytes—or even petabytes— of content, this can quickly translate into six- or seven-figure annual expenses.
The challenge is that a large portion of this spend is often wasted on maintaining cold data that delivers little or no business value.
When businesses migrate from on-premises SharePoint Server or another fileserver to SharePoint Online, costs can skyrocket if cold data is included.
What starts as a modernization initiative often balloons into a budgetary burden.
Many organizations simply do not know how much of their SharePoint content is actively used versus how much is dormant. Without clear reporting, leadership continues to approve costly storage expansion without realizing that a substantial portion of spending is directed at unused data.
Large sites with inactive data can create several challenges for organizations. They clutter libraries, make search results less relevant, and ultimately reduce employee efficiency. Beyond productivity issues, these data also introduce compliance and security risks.
Outdated or forgotten documents may still contain sensitive information, yet they are often not regularly reviewed and may no longer fall under current governance policies. Thus, cold data is not just a financial issue—it undermines information management quality.
What the report provides
A cold data estimation report analyzes SharePoint content and categorizes files by:
This insight allows enterprises to decide whether to:
Cold data can be ofloaded to:
By enforcing defiended offload policies and cleanup schedules, organizations can prevent cold data from accumulating indefinitely
The problem of cold data in SharePoint is more than a technical nuisance, it is a financial liability. Organizations that fail to recognize and manage this issue risk spending vast sums on maintaining information that no longer supports business outcomes. By shining a light on dormant data and addressing it strategically, enterprises can reduce costs, improve efficiency, and strengthen compliance.
Here we'll answer some frequently asked questions about cold data in SharePoint and hidden costs.
Cold data in SharePoint context refers to files that are rarely or never accessed. This can include outdated project reports, legacy documentation, duplicates, or compliance archives. Though inactive, these files still occupy costly SharePoint storage space.
Cold data is a financial problem for organizations because SharePoint Online charges high rates once the base storage quota is exceeded. Many enterprises unknowingly spend thousands, or even millions, each year maintaining data that adds no operational value.
Cold data impacts migration projects because during SharePoint or file server migrations it inflates both: time and cost. It results in longer transfer windows, higher consulting fees, and expanded cloud storage needs, turning modernization efforts into expensive undertakings.
By implementing clear governance policies and automated offload schedules, organizations can systematically move inactive content to cost-effective storage. This prevents long-term data bloat and ensures sustainable information management.
The long-term impact of managing cold data strategically is that enterprises that monitor and manage it, achieve: lower storage costs, faster system performance, and better compliance. More importantly, they maintain a data environment that actively supports business goals rather than draining budgets.