Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons

To me personally the security claims don't make much sense either.

When I face disk space limitations I don't delete my spreadsheet of survey results that's full of private information. I just delete the original video of that public lecture that I've put onto youtube already anyway.

Now, for professors there might be a case for shunting the files they haven't touched in a few years into secure offline storage in case it contains forgotten private information. But it sounds like this applies to student accounts, and there's already a process to eliminate forgotten years-old data: Graduation.

IMHO it's far more likely this is a cost-saving measure.

To be able to store that amount of data on SSDs, you need tons of enterprise mixed load SSDs, and they don't come cheap in any sense or form.

To offset costs, you add tiering with mechanical disks, with varying capacities and readiness states.

Spinning up cold storage takes time and energy, and if you need a three year old CSV file summarizing your results, that's a lot of energy and time. The storage pipeline storing rest of your research might go to "sleep" again until you make sure that you gonna need rest of the dataset and everything to re-run some of the experiments.

The data access pattern maybe hitting some cold paths too often as a result, so Microsoft might be trying to confine research institutions to a warmer tier, and since that tiers are more expensive to operate, they might be slashing storage space. Otherwise the resident data might poison other user's access patterns.

This is not to say Microsoft is doing right, I believe the opposite, but this is why they might be doing it.

Producing, storing, and shipping masses of paper documents (and related printing equipment) isn't particularly efficient. And video/audio would need storing on physical disks/tapes, and so on.

Again, cost-cutting is great, especially when it can be done with no impact to consumers and employees, because those are humans I care about.

In this case, it is at the expense of consumers, the people who are affected are getting less for their money. Shrinkflation if you will, but because of the corporate, bureaucratic and dysfunctional mess between the people paying and the people choosing MSFT — and the way MSFT operates, which is by bundling basically everything but the kitchen sink — there really is no practical way for the consumer to shop around with their money for a better cloud storage deal.

MSFT could still be the most inefficient storage, cloud storage space from competitors could be much more energy efficient for the same amount of GB — but the storage will stay with MSFT because they bundle it with everything else.

This has nothing to do with the efficiency of cloud storage or the carbon footprint of cloud storage. It has to do with giving people less value for the money that MSFT gets, and it works out because MSFT has done everything they can to ensure that there is no way this will result in revenue reduction.

From a shareholder perspective, this is great, you should give customers the least amount you can for their money so you can maximize profits, but if you tie this together with the immoral business practices of MSFT it really becomes very detrimental to society, the environment, and consumers.

Not sure anyone gave you generous free FTP space back then, and Dropbox wasn't invented yet. But people did absolutely abuse gmail for file storage.

1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

People don't throw away hardware just because the software stopped getting updates. Although not recommended, there's even people still using Windows 7.

Computers were originally built to serve the needs of academics. Now academics are told to serve the needs of (American) computers.

If only any USB-C cable was compatible with iPhone or Pixel it would be fine, but I have 4 USB-C cables that don't work with them.

Keep living with attitude like that, eventually you’ll realize.

* The average person does not do backups. No, he will not do backups. No! He seriously won't. Cloud storage solves this very real, very basic problem.

* The average person does not understand file systems. No, he will not understand file systems. No! He seriously won't. Cloud storage solves this problem by Abstraction(tm).

* The average person does not use much disk space; the biggest chunk is probably the photos on his phone. Combined with the previous, a 1TB HDD/SSD in a NAS at home is "WTF" and "WTF" for him.

Note, we aren't average people.

There is hundreds of companies offering nextcloud hosting, and yet the presumption is that only the big 3 is viable.

The linked post nowhere mentions research data management, or the fact that there's awareness about the existing of services at the institution.

Clearly it's primarily a cost saving measure, and I suspect it will be a significant change for some schools, but I suspect the numbers chosen were based on what most schools are using.

Compare that to datacenter NAS with RAID and with replica NAS redundancy and operating overhead (space, power, people), you're looking at a 9 months to 18 months price tradeoff before factoring in how to maintain a rotating set of users/accounts' storage. Storage is an area it's not difficult to do better than cloud if you are single user just storing one user's content, but it's much harder to do better than cloud if you have user management at scale to add in.

Not sure what 'thread' you mean. If you mean Twitter, you are correct, I did not 'actually read the [Twitter] thread', I went to source at McGill and linked that here, then further linked to Microsoft policy update after using Kagi to find the Microsoft propoganda regurgitated by McGill:

https://kagi.com/search?q=Microsoft%20is%20introducing%20cha....

To be clear, Microsoft is not making McGill limit student storage:

"Every institution’s tenant has a 100TB base storage capacity. Microsoft 365 and Office 365 A3 and A5 paid user licenses add 50GB or 100GB respectively to the pool of storage. In addition, institutions can purchase additional pooled storage in 10TB increments for $300 estimated retail USD monthly to add to the tenant pool. To find your capacity, use this calculation: 100TB + (#A3 paid users x 50GB) + (#A5 paid users x 100 GB) + (additional storage purchased) = capacity/limit."

McGill is making a choice, there is a reasonable price to maintain whatever pool McGill want, and Microsoft's argument for matching Google academic threshold drop was posted 6 months ago, no scramble needed.

> all institutions’ tenants will receive 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with an additional 50GB or 100GB of pooled storage per paid user for A3 and A5 subscriptions, respectively

This is a bad change, period (plus the justification given is basically stepping on a gaping wound), but there are storage guarantees much greater than what McGill's are doing.

But in general it is a trend that IT services are outsourced and that IT departments, and in general administration, in many universities suffer cuts, which is really bad. Apart from the problems this causes, imo this also pauses a security risk as if people's needs are not well covered by services provided, people will find their own solutions without knowledge or consideration to security.

a Seafile seems much more appropriate.