Microsoft Boosts OneDrive for Business From 25GB to 1TB

Microsoft joined the heated cloud storage battle with an updated OneDrive (previously SkyDrive Pro) for Business offer that throws in a terabyte of storage for each subscriber.

Last month Google dropped a bomb in the cloud storage world by lowering its price plans drastically for individual customers. Now Microsoft is joining the race in the business world with its Onedrive for Business offer. The Redmond, WA company announced that each Business plans will be soon bumped to 1TB of cloud storage. Before the change the de facto plan was capped at 25GB of space with the possibility to buy extra. Now each plan will come by default with 1TB. The company also announced migration assistance to OneDrive but provided no specifics about what this encompass.

The boost will be effective both for the standalone plan ($5/user/month) and all the Office365 bundled plans (from $5/user/month to $22/user/month). Businesses paying for a SharePoint server will also be eligible for the upgrade as OneDrive for Business is only really a re-branding of the SharePoint service.

Microsoft is jumping on the massive cloud storage wagon along with Google, Flickr and others. This move in the business space allow the company to outweigh its competitors in terms of price, Drobox and Box offering similar plans but for three time the entry price ($15). For the same price, Microsoft customers get 1TB of storage but also all of the desktop and online Microsoft Office apps. Google Apps are also more expensive and less capable with the default plan including only 30GB at $5/month.

But the service also suffers from certain limitation. The 5,000 items sync limit of SharePoint is causing problems with users and the service is still afflicted with some metadata changes caused by the SharePoint tool. The lack of a Mac client also limits the possibility.

On the blog post announcing the change a Microsoft spokesperson said: “The cloud is about breaking down walls between people and information. Not building a new set of islands in the sky.” A thought that would be promising if the ecosystem war raging between the big players wasn’t in fact recreating fragmentation in the cloud. Each cloud services being better integrated in their own desktop or mobile platform. But to be fair, Microsoft is going to some great lengths to make its service available in a majority of platforms, mostly because it has to stand a chance of competing in the market.

The bump to 1TB is in the process of rolling out to all users, the company said that it will “roll out over the next few months.“

Customers also have until September to sign for a 50% discounted price for the standalone plan for the first year, bringing the price to $2.5/month.