Microsoft Lowers Azure Storage Price & Undercuts Amazon Web Services

The “Game of the Cloud” is getting intense, with users flocking to cloud services, looking for the most competitive pricing schemes that offer reliability and security. Amazon Web Services is on top of things, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for competition. Microsoft, for one, is not going to get left behind. In fact, as early as April last year, the company announced their commitment “to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth.”

Less than a year later, it seems that Microsoft is still trying to get ahead in the game, this time by going even lower in pricing for Azure.

Released in February 2010, Windows Azure is Microsoft’s contribution to the cloud game. The cloud computing platform and infrastructure is being touted as the cloud for modern business, supporting different programming languages as well as providing tools and frameworks.

Starting March 13, 2014, Microsoft is implementing a further reduction on its Azure storage pricing scheme, specifically for Block Blobs Storage and Disks/Page Blobs Storage.

The company is not hiding its motivation for this price reduction: to match (or even undercut) Amazon Web Services’s prices.

The updated pricing scheme is going to be implemented worldwide, so this means that in certain parts of the world, Azure will be even cheaper than Amazon.

Of course, Microsoft is quick to emphasize that while pricing is a key factor, they also say it’s not merely a “price decision”. Enter marketing…

From the announcement:

“…it’s also about great performance, reliability and scalability.  We are deeply committed to maintaining market leading price-for-performance and providing best in class reliability / scalability.”

Of course, that’s Microsoft talking, so if you want an external point of view, here’s a white paper that may give you some insights on the major cloud players: Cloud Computing Performance a Comparative Analysis of 5 Large Cloud IaaS Providers.

[Image via apterainc]