Cloud Computing Price War to Benefit Companies on the Cloud

On Monday, March 31, Microsoft announced it would cut prices on several of its cloud computing services. The announcement follows Amazon’s price drop on its Amazon Web Services from last week — and Google’s price cut a day before that — in what The New York Times called a “watershed week” for cloud computing services.

Microsoft made its announcement when Windows Azure manager Steven Martin made a blog post outlining Microsoft’s intent to cut prices on its various cloud services by 27% to 65%, according to a Re/code article. Amazon’s price cut will reduce prices on its Amazon Web Services by 36% to 65%. Google slashed prices on its Google Cloud Platform from 32% to 85%.

Amazon is currently the web’s leader in both cloud computing capacity available and overall customers, according to Re/code. With this sea change in cloud computing prices, it remains to be seen whether or not Amazon will stay on top.

But what do these price cuts mean for the companies and businesses that use cloud computing — and those that haven’t yet made the switch?

With these plans for expansion across the board, it has become clear that cloud computing will soon become part of virtually every business in some way.

“What is surprising to us is how long it took,” Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing at Amazon Web Services, the biggest cloud computing company, said, according to The New York Times. “This is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. We assumed from the beginning it was unlikely we’d be the only participant.”

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