Microsoft Corp. says that a recent change how much cloud storage its Office 365 consumer customers can use won’t affect Office 365 Business customers. But just how much cloud storage businesses can normally expect to receive is less clear.
After just one year of offering unlimited cloud storage via OneDrive for its Office 365 customers, Microsoft announced on Monday that it will now start imposing some very modest caps on that storage. Subscriptions to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University will now receive 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
Why? Apparently a few bad apples ruined the free storage party for everyone.
“A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings,” the blog post reads. “In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”
When ITWC contacted Microsoft Canada to see if the update affected business users, a spokesperson responded that the announcement was related to consumers only and there are no changes to announce for Office 365 Business storage plans.
Trying to figure out exactly how much cloud storage comes with the business plans proves harder than you might think. Reviewing the plans and pricing page on the Office 365 website shows that 1 TB of storage per user is offered for each plan – Business Essentials, Business, and Business Premium. But probing further via a conversation with a support rep yields different information. Here’s what our conversation with a support rep looked like.
At first, Microsoft’s support rep shares information that’s consistent with what’s on the website:
Upon being asked if there was no unlimited storage option for OneDrive available, support responded with the opposite answer:
Dayanne confirmed that unlimited storage was available for all tiers of Office 365 for business. Finally, when we shared the Microsoft blog post about consumer plans being capped at 1 TB, this was the response:
When asked to elaborate on whether Office 365 Business users get 1 TB of storage per user, or unlimited storage, Microsoft Canada’s spokesperson declined to comment.
Are you using Office 365 at your business? Let us know what cloud storage space you’re able to access per user in the comments below.