Data Backup Digest

The cloud storage market continues to get even more competitive. Google have recently announced that they are slashing the prices of their Google Drive service. It’s a big move and a swing that is sure to have competitors wondering whether to follow suit.

“Thanks to a number of recent infrastructure improvements, we’re able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere,” said Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management at Google in an official blog post.

As always, everyone can sign up to get 15GB of free storage. However, 100GB now costs $1.99 a month (previously $4.99), 1TB now costs $9.99 a month (previously $49.99) and 10TB costs $99.99.

These price changes have come into effect immediately, so if you can go take advantage of the new prices right now. Those already subscribed at the old prices will automatically be subscribed to a better plan at no additional cost.

For the average user, 100GB is likely going to be more than enough. That amount of space will host a solid amount of photos, videos and documents. Should you need more, though, the great thing is that it’s become even more affordable than ever.

These changes are a significant undercut to what competitors are currently charging. Dropbox sells 100GB for $9.99 a month (that’s $8 difference) and OneDrive charge $50 a year for 100GB (twelve monthly instalments on Drive will cost you $23.88 for the same amount of space).

There are a lot of cloud providers out there and it is becoming hard to distinguish between them. A lot of them offer the same features and are often competing on price. As such, these price cuts are a bold move from Google and are sure to attract attention. In fact, many internet commenters have already proclaimed that they’ll be moving their data over to the search engine giant’s service.

Those in charge of enterprise IT might note that these price cuts mean Drive is cheaper than the usual infrastructure-as-a-service providers. For example, Amazon Web Services’ S3 costs $8.50 per 100GB and Microsoft’s Windows Azure costs $6.80 per 100GB of locally redundant stored data. Interestingly, Google Cloud Storage charges £6.30 for 100GB and this has now been undercut by the firm’s own service.

The Register believe that this shows “good indication Google is about to dramatically lower the price of its mainstream infrastructure pricing”. The site spoke to a Silicon Valley business that revealed it had been working with Google “on qualifying its technology on a big upgrade to their storage engine”.

The site also notes that it is likely that Amazon and Microsoft will be making similar moves to return the ball to Google’s court. It seems that this is only the beginning of a cloud storage price war and it’ll be very interesting to see where it goes. At the moment it seems great for us consumers, since we can get even more storage space at increasingly cheaper prices.