As organisations embrace digital processes, data storage costs can soar. Microsoft’s two new innovations aim to combat rising dataverse storage costs.
Although Microsoft’s Dataverse storage limits should be generous enough for most businesses, those that choose to store emails or vast numbers of records may start to receive warning emails about being close to, or over, capacity. This can have a serious impact as we’ve covered before in a our guide to freeing up Dynamics 365 storage.
Previously, the only two options were to delete data or buy more storage, but two recent Microsoft changes can bring great benefits to these businesses.
Email storage changes
In Dataverse, the body of an email is stored in the Description column of the Activity table. This has traditionally been stored as a database storage and is often the main cause of organisations going over capacity. This is changing as this Description column is being relocated to unstructured Azure Blob storage (also used for storage of attachments, annotations, files, and images). This change means that the data will now be stored as File storage, but due to the compressed nature of the data, the increae in File storage will be less than the data removed from the Database storage.
The good news is that this change is automatic and Microsoft are steadily rolling this change to organisations over the next six to twelve weeks. At Strategy 365, we’re already seeing clients benefitting from significant decreases in storage requirements and we expect to see this continue across our client base.
Dataverse long term data retention
Currently in preview and for non-production environments only, long term data retention helps to remove the need for deleting and archiving old data by allowing for the creation of retention policies to move old data to long term storage. While Dataverse can support business growth with no limit on active data, it might be worth considering moving inactive data to the Dataverse long term retention store. Pricing for this long term storage has yet to be announced, but should be significantly lower than the cost of purchasing regular database storage.
It is important to be aware that retained data reads are significantly slower than live data reads. This is not a feature for transactional operations, but should be used for rarely accessed data , such as for compliance requirements. Querying this data does come with limitations, which can be reviewed here.
As this feature is in preview and can only be used on Sandbox environments, it may be worth waiting until the feature has reached general availability before looking to implementing it, but it is certainly something to be aware of, particularly for those organisations with strict legal compliance obligations.
Summary
It is great to see that Microsoft are addressing the storage concerns that many organisations have. While having more and more data stored in one location certainly helps businesses with their internal processes, this storage does come at a cost, so these new innovations will certainly help to keep those costs down. For existing Strategy 365 clients, if you wish to discuss these changes with one of our experts, feel free to get in touch.
