Cloud year in review 2014: Price wars, renewable energy, legal concerns, outages

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: James Sanders.

In 2014, the landscape of cloud computing has changed significantly with the ongoing price wars between the three major vendors: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. New technology in cloud has led to more user convenience, as well as deploying systems with a smaller environmental footprint than traditional mainstream data centers. However, cloud providers face a stormy future amid litigation threatening the security of data stored by cloud users, as well as the liability cloud vendors face.

Price wars in enterprise cloud lead to savings for businesses

Undeniably, the big story of the year is the massive extent to which cloud prices have fallen. On March 25, 2014, Google slashed the prices of all of its cloud offerings, with Compute Engine prices cut 32%, data storage cut 68%, and BigQuery cut 85%. Further discounts can be had with sustained use discounts, cutting the reduced prices by a further 30%. Microsoft followed suit on September 25, 2014, announcing more modest price cuts to Azure cloud services…

Over the last six weeks, more creative price reductions have been introduced, with Amazon introducing upfront billing for cloud services, with savings up to 75% off the on-demand prices for three-year agreements. Amazon also has lowered the price of outbound data transfer for US and Europe centers by 25%, Australia by 26%, and Tokyo by 30%…

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