Don't despair, there is so much you can do about it, but your storage headache can be significantly reduced, so let's understand the problem first.

This topic has been completely ignored because unlike with Microsoft Dynamics CE and Dataverse, Microsoft basically did not control storage consumption for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O. You got a certain amount of database and file storage when you signed up for it, based on the number and types of licenses you purchased.

And no one gave a thought to the fact that even if that provided enough storage to boot, that the amount of data in any business grows over time, not to mention that the amount of storage you get when you sign up has nothing to do with how much you need. It's just some fixed amount based on who knows what.

But now that Microsoft has decided to enforce storage consumption, many (very many) customers have discovered that they are consuming many times their entitlement. Not that it's a secret, but here is how the amount of storage you get out-of-the-box is calculated.

The easiest way check how much storage you are consuming is in the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC). go to the Finance and operations tab page to see details. And now I recommend you read this document Finance and operations storage capacity - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn. 

There is some very useful information in the overview, such as how much storage you are using of your entitlement. If you are consuming more than your entitlement the bar will not be green but yellow or red depending on how much you are over the entitlement.

If you really want to, you can validate the storage entitlement using the information above, but the information in PPAC is all you need for the sake of what I'm covering here.

The next step is how much more storage you have to purchase to be compliant, and how much you will need going forward. Well the answer to the first question is pretty simple, the difference between your entitlement and your consumption.

The shocking part comes when you you are quoted additional storage costs (as I have heard and confirmed by available public information) at $40 per GB month, yikes when you think you could get a SAN disk rack starting at $2,500 and add very capable SSD's at about $1.000 per 3TB.

It's not unreasonable for even a medium sized business to grow 500GB of data per year, not considering the amount you already are over your entitlement. If you do the math $40 x 500GB p/month = $20,000 p/month, i.e. your storage costs grow by $240.000 per year. Even on the low end of say 200 GB growth per year and we are still looking at an additional $96.000 of cost per year for database storage.

Now let me add something that does not seem to be clear to many people. Your storage entitlement is for your whole tenant. That means consumption from your production as well as all your so called sandbox environments. So if your production environment is consuming 1TB and you need a copy of the database in a sandbox for testing or debugging purposes, then you will consume 2TB total. Now add all the other environments you have (good example of how many some businesses have below).

Since file storage capacity is not a problem for most businesses I have not covered but if you have a lot of document attachments or are legally required to archive invoices (in some countries you are required to do it), then you need to think about this too.

Also keep in mind that I have not factored in your Dataverse consumption and with the growing number of use cases involving Dataverse, this will add to your costs. For example:

• D365CE

• D365CE to D365F&O integration

• D365F&O Archiving

• D365F&O to Fabric and Synapse Link