Every Australian university is confronting the same shift at once. Microsoft's move away from unlimited education storage to a capped pool means that, at each institution's renewal through late 2026, terabytes of content now sitting in OneDrive and SharePoint move from free to charged.

The harder problem is what that content actually is. A great deal of it is research data: held in individual staff accounts, lost when people leave, without the metadata, custody or retention that good research practice and records obligations demand. The storage bill is the visible symptom. The real question is where research and working data should live, and how a university moves it there without disrupting the people who depend on it every day.

This session looks at that question as a sector. We will share what the numbers look like across institutions, why cleanup campaigns alone cannot close the gap, and the design principles behind a sovereign, Australian approach that keeps Microsoft 365 as the everyday front door while moving data that does not belong there into managed, FAIR-ready storage, with Copilot and Purview continuity preserved.

We will be candid about what is hard: user experience, governance boundaries, and the honest limits of any approach.

Attendees will leave with a practical way to size their own exposure and a framework for the decisions facing both IT and research leadership before renewal.