Storage optimization can become a sales conversation surprisingly quickly. A tenant is running out of capacity, somebody proposes an archive, and the discussion jumps directly to where data should move.
We wanted CBITS Lens to start one step earlier: with evidence.
Lens was designed to analyze a Microsoft 365 environment, organize the storage picture into useful categories, and produce a report that can stand on its own before anyone makes an archive decision.
Read first. Change nothing.
The core Lens analysis is intentionally read-only. Its Microsoft Graph application permissions are used to inventory SharePoint content and version information, not to modify or relocate customer files.
That separation matters. Analysis should not require an organization to begin a migration project just to learn whether it has a storage opportunity.
It also keeps the workflow easy to reason about: connect Lens, analyze the environment, review the results, and decide what — if anything — should happen next.
Analyze where the work is happening
Lens is a Windows desktop application. The scanner processes the SharePoint inventory for the organization running it and builds the analysis locally rather than turning Lens into another repository for customer content.
Our optional product telemetry is deliberately limited to summary information such as scan duration, aggregate counts, storage totals, age buckets, and version-sampling measurements. It does not send file contents, file paths, site URLs, or user information as part of that telemetry.
That gives us useful information about how Lens performs in the field without collecting the data customers are using Lens to analyze.
Separate visibility from the recommendation
Lens does not treat every old file as something that must be archived. Instead, it shows the organization what exists: current-file storage, inactive-content age bands, version-history estimates, and the potential financial impact of managing some of that storage differently.
That distinction is important to us. A file can be old and still be valuable. An environment can have a large archive opportunity and still decide that some or all of the content belongs in SharePoint.
The report is there to make the tradeoff visible, not to hide it.
Build the analysis before the archive
Lens is also part of how we are approaching CBITS Atlas. Rather than begin with an archive platform and work backward to justify it, we built the analysis layer first.
That has forced us to answer the harder questions up front: What is actually consuming storage? How old is it? How much is current data versus historical versions? How confidently can we estimate the opportunity without turning every scan into an unnecessarily long process?
Those answers make the eventual archive conversation much more useful.
Good tooling should make the next decision easier
The best outcome from Lens is not a particular archive percentage. It is an organization going from a single tenant-level storage number to a clear picture of what is underneath it.
That is the development principle we keep coming back to: visibility first, action second.