The cloud storage price wars being waged by Google, Amazon, Microsoft have been getting a lot of press this summer.
As the chart below from TechCrunch's Cloud Storage is Eating the World Alive shows, since March of this year the cost per gigabyte of cloud storage has fallen by more than 50%.
As the article points out, the current price is not far from $0.
But the price declines are not just limited to storage. Amazon, for example, recently announced price cuts ranging from 28% and 51% across a variety of their Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud product line.
Cloud application vendors are also joining in. Splunk, a cloud based data analytics service, recently cut their prices by 33%.
And Google is telling everyone to expect price declines to continue.
These cost reductions are leading to more small businesses (and consumers, and big businesses) migrating to the cloud. But it's not just price reductions driving this trend:
- The shift to mobile computing is increasingly requiring cloud storage so files are easily available across multiple devices and geographies.
- Growing numbers of applications are cloud based due to the use of large datasets or the need for computing horse power. Use of these cloud apps are exposing more businesses to the cloud.
- increasing collaboration across teams, geographies and organizations is leading to the growing use of cloud based collaboration tools.
- Cloud uptime and reliability are improving, reducing concerns about the use of cloud applications.
These factors largely explain why we believe the cloud is a transformation technology for small businesses. We explain this in the Intuit presentation Small Business Success in the Cloud.
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