Data Backup Digest

The fight for the cloud crown continues to rage on. With cloud providers finding it difficult to differentiate on features, the draw to consumers is on price against capacity and the surrounding ecosystem. For example, Google tie Drive in to their products like Gmail, while Microsoft have linked the Office package with OneDrive.

Amazon is the latest technology giant to place another card on the table. Towards the end of March the company introduced two unlimited packages to their Amazon Cloud Drive platform. These depend on the type of data that you want to store in the cloud.

The first plan, Prime Photos, costs $12 a year and allows you to store an unlimited amount of photos. You also get 5GB for videos and any other files. For owners of the Fire tablet and phone, along with Prime customers who pay $99 a year for two-day shipping and video streaming, this will continue to be included for free as part of the package.

The second plan, Unlimited Everything, does what it says on the tin. You can store as many photos, videos, music and other files as you like. This costs $60 a year and functions for those wanting a full backup of all their personal data.

Both of these plans come with a free three month trial, allowing you to test out the service and see if it suits your cloud needs. Of course, Amazon hope that you will become accustomed to the service and begin paying, but you can cancel at any time if it isn’t for you.

Amazon is already a huge contender in the enterprise cloud business due to its Amazon Web Services offering. The firm rent out the storage of their data centres, along with the processing power, tools and other economies of scale that come with it, providing other companies that don’t want to invest in that with the technology. It seems Amazon is now putting its foot forward and making a strong move into the consumer playing field.

However, Amazon isn’t the only provider to offer unlimited storage. Google offers unlimited capacity to those subscribed to their Drive for Work service and education apps suite. Microsoft also offers unlimited cloud storage for those customers who subscribe to Office 365 for $70 a year – possibly a more lucrative offering than Amazon’s considering that this comes with the Office package.

Where Amazon does differ is that they don’t cap the individual file size of data uploaded, meaning customers can upload data across all their different devices without having to worry about whether it’s too big to go onto their cloud storage, whereas some of their competitors do. Those competitor storage caps do keep increasing though, so it’ll be interesting to see if any of the big players adjust their limitations in response to Amazon’s new packages.

With Amazon now making strong moves to draw consumers over to their service, especially considering the already enticing Prime deal, this can only mean good things for the end user who will see companies dropping prices and making their services more lucrative in order to draw them in.