Tech giants slash cloud prices

Computerworld UK reports.

Microsoft dropped the price of its Azure Storage Pay-as-you-Go service and lowered the price of its six-month storage plan.

Earlier this week, Google cut the price of its Cloud Storage service and Amazon Web Services dropped prices on Elastic Compute Cloud, Relational Database Service, ElastiCache and Elastic Map Reduce.

The price cuts come as the service providers try to convince potential new customers to move to a cloud storage model, CIO states.

"The myth is that cloud computing is always cost-effective," says David Linthicum, CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, a company that advises businesses on moving to the cloud. "In many instances, it's not."

He adds that Microsoft, Google and Amazon may also be bracing for the near future when other big companies with deep pockets like HP and telecommunications providers offer cloud services.

The price drop comes on the heels of an announcement Microsoft made that it will be crediting all Azure customers 33% of their bills for any billing cycle affected by the cloud service outage that occurred on 29 February, even if those customers were not directly affected by the bug, TechFlash says.