Analysis of State of Cloud Storage: War Continues

With all the big developers conference from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google now over, it is interesting to see how the market for cloud storage is now distributed.

These past few years, cloud storage has developed from a mere commodity to one of the de-facto choice for backup and storing data. Each company is building its own ecosystem with smartphones, tablets and laptops with cloud storage as the underlying unifying technology. As cloud capacity rises and prices plummet, let’s take a look at what each company offers.

Microsoft
The latest move from the Redmond’s company in the cloud storage business was quite an aggressive one and was aimed directly at Google.

First of all each Microsoft account will now be accommodated 15GB of free OneDrive storage. The company more than doubled its previous 7GB free offering, coming neck to neck with Google’s own Drive service. The two companies now hold the largest consumer-grade free storage offerings.

But the even more interesting play took place with the various Office 365 plans. All of its personal and business plans will now come with 1TB of storage. The cheapest Office 365 plans starts at $6.99 monthly for a single-person subscription. A ‘Home’ plan will cost $9.99 monthly and will give 1TB per user for up to 5 users. The small business, SMBs and enterprise plans will also come with their terabyte of user storage. All users will be automatically moved to the lower pricing.

And for those who don’t want or need Office subscriptions, at $1.99/month, you now get 100GB of storage and 200GB at $3.99/month.

Amazon
With the introduction of its Fire Phone, Amazon announced a take on the photo archiving front. While Amazon Cloud Drive never really competes in terms of ease of use or pricing with other offering, the integration of free unlimited photo backup could well be a bold move in the market.

Automatic photo upload is nothing new, Dropbox, Google (through Google+), Facebook and others have offered this functionality for quite some time, but it was often limited in resolution size or didn’t come preloaded with phones. Amazon’s offering has better potential. Each Fire phone user will be offered unlimited and unrestricted backup of all the pictures taken with their phone, and it won’t need any additional software download, the service being ready out-of-the-box.

While the system could potentially be abused by workarounds, if there’s one company than can absorb the minority of potential cheaters it surely is Amazon.

Apple
During its WWDC, the firm unveiled an ever so slightly more traditional way to handle its cloud storage offer: iCloud Drive. Instead of tying only an application to the stream of user generated content like before, iCloud Drive approach the cloud from a file and folder perspective. With a distant folder connected to the cloud and a web interface, Apple is adopting Dropbox, Drive and OneDrive approach. Both OS X and iOS will have an actual interface to manage all of the uploaded files.

From a pricing point of view, the firm offers only 5GB of free storage, a little more than Dropbox but definitely less than OneDrive or Drive. On the other hand, its one of the few offering plans with less than 100GB of storage for those who don’t need so much space. A 20GB plans will cost $0.99 monthly. The 200GB cap is aligned with other offerings at $3.99 per month. As for the 1TB, no precise price was announced.

Apple is entering quite late in the game and has had a history of struggles with its cloud services but this addition to the lineup should be enough to keep its user in the enclosed ecosystem. An iCloud Drive client for Windows 8 will also be released.

Google
Similarly to Apple, it was during its annual developers conference, Google I/O, that the search giant announced few tweaks to its cloud storage solution.

Google made an update to the cloud storage side of its Google Apps Business and introduced Drive for Work with unlimited storage for $10/month. This is Google’s attempt to try and compete with Microsoft recently announced Office 365 1TB shift. Both companies are trying to take over the productivity and office market in the cloud.

For $10/month/user, business can enjoy unlimited storage with a limit of 5TB per file. It should be noted though that this is available only for business with at least 5 users. Otherwise the plan is capped to 1TB. The service offers granular audit features for IT managers to monitor actions taken on files and folders. It will also be capable of editing Microsoft Office files without conversion and all the data will  be end-to-end encrypted.

Google’s alternative to Microsoft Office 365 is a less-featured but more generous offering for those who don’t need the full power of a desktop app in the cloud.

The cloud war seems far from over, and with declining prices and bigger capacity, remote storage is becoming the central part of any ecosystem. Big cloud companies are making great efforts to attract business customers, users will need to choose wisely because their choice will likely determined far more than simply which platform their files is on.