For over a decade, George Mason University’s Microsoft 365 (M365) environment has been a core platform for email, file storage, teaching, research, and collaboration.
Tools like OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange became essential to how we work and learn, and for many years, storage felt effectively unlimited. Vendor policy shifts, rapid growth in usage, and increasing security and retention expectations have reshaped the storage landscape across higher education. In August 2023, Microsoft announced a new pooled storage model that ended unlimited growth, replacing it with fixed storage allocations tied to licenses.
As a result, George Mason’s production tenant was reduced from more than 26 petabytes(PB) to approximately 933 terabytes(TB), shared across services. While still substantial, this new limit carries heightened financial and operational implications if growth continues unchecked. In response, ITS launched the M365 Storage Project to ensure George Mason’s digital environment remains sustainable, secure, and aligned with institutional needs now and into the future.
At the same time Microsoft adjusted its policies, George Mason’s storage usage was accelerating faster than ever. Between March 2023 and March 2025, M365 storage consumption grew from roughly 435 TB to more than 754 TB, an increase of nearly 29 in just two years. Average growth during the 2024–2025 fiscal year alone was more than 15 TB per month. At that pace, the university would have exhausted its available storage by January 2026 without intervention.
Specifically, our analysis found that more than 90% of users and shared spaces use less than 5 GB of storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange. This reinforced that our challenge is not driven by typical day‑to‑day use, but rather a relatively small number of accounts, workspaces, and legacy data sets (with the absence of lifecycle management), which were responsible for most long‑term growth. Additionally, retaining large volumes of outdated or unnecessary data creates security and compliance risks, particularly when it exceeds records retention requirements.
Rather than reacting to a crisis later, this project is meant to take a proactive and transparent approach—introducing role‑based quotas, reclaiming unused space, refining account and workspace lifecycles, and educating the community that cloud sustainability requires shared responsibility.
Our goal is not to limit the use of these tools, but to promote intentional use that delivers the greatest value while reducing risk and cost for the university. This long-term planning approach ensures that George Mason’s M365 environment remains reliable, secure, and ready for what comes next.