Storage is actually not that expensive in enterprise settings. One of the schools around where I lived ran some kind of google education enterprise solution (they rebranded it to something else now but it’s the same thing) and for something like $5/mo/person (probably more now) the institution had several hundred TB of common storage and each person had an additional hundred GB, along with a complete IT package with a LMS, enterprise level fleet deployment and management systems, etc.
Yeah licensing cost was a significant line item in the IT budget but not as much as you’d think. I mean, think about it, a 1k student school will have pay probably 100k to google (staff costs money too and price has probably gone up since I last looked at it), which is the salary+benefits of like 1 and a half IT guys. You’ll need way more than that for 1k students, plus enterprise internet, servers, hardware maintenance, laptops for everybody, etc. So if you add everything up it’s a small part of the IT budget to achieve this.