WFH and the challenge of the resulting Teams Data Explosion for companies

If the WFH phenomenon has fast tracked one thing for us all, that is the adoption of video conferencing through platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Chime and GoToMeeting to name a few. We have all had to adapt very quickly to meeting in the comfort or discomfort of our homes, staring for long hours at our screens with few breaks in the day!

The Microsoft and the Office365 (O365) suit have grabbed the bull by the horns and have dominated the market. Their ability to bring document, file and conversation content together as a site has transformed the way we interact, sharing and storing content at a click of a mouse, instantaneously, making the WFH worlds extremely viable and fundamentally workable.

While positive, the challenge is that this has resulted in a MASSIVE data explosion and storage requirements for organisations, as employees freely store loads of content, word docs, excel files, PPT’s and pictures to their Teams site. And then there is the recordings of meetings to consider! Naturally this is seeing storage requirements and costs soar. Over and above this, companies are struggling with governance risks within these Teams folders, as many/most sites quickly become orphan sites but are rarely deleted. This has exposed companies to risks relating to data exposure and hence, corporate espionage. We are working with organisations that have Teams sites running into the 100’s of 1000’s that are largely unmanaged.

For most organisations, this is a real concern. The risk and cost of this scenario is literally keeping CIO’s and IT Executives/Manages awake at night, with no sign of the office coming back to routines any time soon.

iOCO has developed some really good frameworks to help organisations manage the governance of their Team sites to reduce the risk of 1000’s of orphan sites. We understand that implementing the right retention policies and structures pertaining to Team sites Clean-ups is possible, but time consuming and can be expensive. However, tackling this early in your organisation can reduce the risks and the costs associated with this inevitable scenario playing out.

We have the privilege of having a team that has decades of experience and saw the same scenario playing out in the days when SharePoint really took off for organisations, and we witnessed the explosion of intranet sites and libraries across companies. Harnessing this experience, together with the latest toolsets, iOCO Cloud can assist you.