Case Study: City Year reduces storage costs and increases AmeriCorps impact with Microsoft Azure

All-cloud commitment: City Year uses Azure data archives to help increase AmeriCorps impact and efficiency

City Year, a national AmeriCorps organization that places more than 3,000 members in 327 high‑need schools, needed to complete a move to an all‑cloud IT environment while migrating a mountain of unstructured data—over 30 TB on 15 on‑premises file servers—much of it inactive or years old. The challenge was to decommission legacy servers, avoid cluttering Office 365, and reduce IT overhead without diverting staff time from supporting students.

City Year implemented a policy‑based migration using HubStor cloud archive on Microsoft Azure, sending active files to Office 365 and archiving older data to Azure with single sign‑on, compression, and deduplication. The result: servers were decommissioned, 30 TB was reduced to under 8 TB, monthly storage costs fell from about $20,000 to under $1,000, and IT burden decreased—freeing staff and AmeriCorps members to focus more effectively on student impact.

City Year

Welles Hatch

Chief Information Officer