Amazon offered a stunning Black Friday promotion for its Amazon Cloud Drive that gives users a year of unlimited cloud storage for $5. The promotional price of $5 represents a 92% discount on the regular price of $59.99/year and illustrates the intensity of Amazon’s interest in grabbing a space within the cloud storage space amongst the likes of Dropbox Pro, Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. Amazon’s pricing trumps Microsoft, which had offered Office 365 subscribers unlimited storage on its Microsoft OneDrive platform until an internal investigation revealed a subset of users were using storage in excess of 75 TB per user, causing Microsoft to subsequently curtail storage for Office 365 subscribers to 1 TB per user. Bear in mind that Amazon’s promotional price of $5 is almost certain to increase in subsequent years, upon renewal. Nevertheless, the plan allows uploads of an unlimited number of files, including full resolution photos. More importantly, from Amazon’s standpoint, the Cloud Drive promotion continues the consumerization of Amazon’s cloud platform by luring more and more users to its platform, thereby creating the potential for consumer spillage to other Amazon products and services. Rest assured that competition in the cloud storage price is likely to only continue to intensify as Box and Dropbox go head to head with cloud behemoths such as Amazon and Microsoft. Regardless, the real winners are consumers who stand to benefit not only from downward trajectories in price, but also from enhanced functionality for file uploads, storage and retrieval that will likely accompany increased competition within the cloud storage space.
Cloud Computing Today 