Microsoft 365 Education is what Imperial uses as an organisation to access productivity tools such as OneDrive and Office 365. We purchase this from Microsoft with licenses for staff and students that provide a set level of capabilities, including a default amount of storage space.
From 1 August 2024 Microsoft is enforcing changes to storage quotas for all Education customers. This includes moving to a model where Microsoft provide a pool of shared storage plus an allowance for each paid staff licence held by the institution. This total storage quota is then shared across all accounts (staff and student). This model differs from our current default OneDrive allowance of 5TB per user, which far exceeds the new free data allowance.
Once implemented on 1 August 2024, the changes will see a reduction in free storage we have included in our license across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange (Microsoft Outlook). This means we will have to pay Microsoft a substantial fee to increase our quota and maintain current levels. Fortunately we’ve secured an agreement with Microsoft that these changes will not come into effect for Imperial until October 2025, so long as we can demonstrate we are implementing measures to reduce our storage to bring us closer to Microsoft’s quota.
What you can do to help?
No decision has been made on how we should respond to the changes imposed by Microsoft, and we will work together to seek sustainable long-term solutions for data storage. In the meantime, you can make small changes to help.
This includes:
[list user behaviour changes here].
Support
These webpages will be updated with key information as we explore our options and respond to the changes imposed by Microsoft.
If you have any concerns or question please contact the ICT Service Desk.
Last updated: 23 April 2024