Amazon joined the Cloud Wars today, announcing that it would cut Amazon Web Services' cloud storage subscriptions by as much as 65 percent. Just a few weeks ago, Google set of the cloud storage price war when it slashed its Google Drive subscription prices by as much as 85 percent. It also added more cuts on Wednesday.
Google turned the cloud storage industry on its head with its dramatic price cuts earlier this month and now its competitors are racing to catch up before Google steals all their customers. Amazon Web Services is among the first companies to take the bait and join Google in the Cloud Wars.
Amazon Senior Vice President Andy Jassy made the announcement on Thursday, stating that Amazon was once again cutting its prices for cloud storage subscriptions.
"Lowering prices is not new to us," said Jassy. "This is something we've done now 42 times. You can expect us to do this periodically."
Amazon will cut prices for its EC2, S3, Relational Database Service and Elastic MapReduce services. Price cuts for Amazon's cloud storage services will reach as much as 65 percent or as little as 36 percent, depending on the product in question. Users will now pay just $0.03 for each gigabyte of standard storage until they reach 1TB. Those who buy more than 1 TB of storage will pay $0.0295 until they reach 50 TB and so on.
"We've often talked about the benefits that AWS's scale and focus creates for our customer," Amazon Web Services chief Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. "Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work."
Amazon's new cloud storage plans are ideal for business users and those who really need a ton of cloud storage. Overall, Amazon cloud storage is still more expensive than Google Drive storage, but Amazon boasts that its service is more powerful, faster and more secure. Amazon will also offer a new service called Amazon Work Spaces, which allows subscribers to access Microsoft Office and other desktop applications over the Web on their tablets or laptops.
"When you look at all those capabilities, they don't exist anywhere else," Jassy said.
Amazon Web Services are used by Netflix, the U.S. Defense Department, Pintrest and more because they are among the most secure and effective cloud computing services currently on the market. For the average, individual user, Amazon's cloud storage isn't the best deal, so Google Drive still wins out there.
It will be interesting to see if Dropbox, OneDrive and other cloud storage services decide to lower their prices now that Amazon has followed in Google's footsteps.
