Cloud storage battle: Google & Amazon slash cloud prices

Amazon and Google have gone to war over cloud prices, with both firms cutting the cost of storage by over a quarter.

Google began by dropping the price of cloud services by 20 per cent earlier this week, only for Amazon to trump it with a reduction of its own for Amazon Web Services. The savings for Amazon customers range from 24 per cent to 28 per cent depending on the amount of data used and take effect from December 1.

"We continue to innovate on our customers' behalf, and we're delighted to pass savings on to you," read the Amazon announcement.

In what appears to be a move designed to stay under Amazon's new pricing, Google announced a further ten per cent reduction in cloud storage prices, bringing the overall reduction since the beginning of the week to over 30 per cent.

"We are committed to delivering the best value in the marketplace to businesses and developers looking to operate in the cloud," said a Google blog post announcing the latest cloud price drop. Like Amazon's, the new prices for Google cloud services also take effect from December 1.

Google's price drop comes after the firm announced customers will now be allowed to store data in Europe.

Cloud uptake is increasing across all levels of business and the competition between Google and Amazon is a clear attempt by other to attract more customers to the lucrative world of cloud services.

While one of the major perceived benefits of cloud users is savings on their IT spends, a number of high-profile Amazon Web Service outages mean cynics have plenty of reasons not to trust the reliability of cloud services.

Security is another key factor in reluctance by organisations to move away from traditional datacentres, but Google have argued that data is actually more secure in the cloud.