Storage – the crack cocaine of cloud computing

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Storage price slashing continues as Microsoft meets cuts Google and Amazon traded last week. There’s method in this madness — lots of businesses have yet to test the cloud, and cheap storage is a way to attract those newbies. And once they’re hooked, watch out!

Okay, the analogy is imperfect, but, it is becoming clear that storage is the easiest way to get new customers into a given cloud. And, once they’re there, Amazon, Google, Microsoft can woo them with fancier (and pricier) higher-end services. The thinking is: Get them started with cheap storage, move them to compute and right on up the stack to data warehousing and analysis. Then you really have them hooked…

Microsoft is the latest cloud vendor to cut storage prices — less than a week after Amazon and Google cut prices three times between them — those cuts conveniently timed for the AWS: Reinvent show. Microsoft’s move, which takes effect December 12, cuts Azure storage prices by as much as 28 percent depending on volume, according to a blog post by Steve Martin, general manager of Windows Azure. The company last cut its storage prices 12 percent in March. With this latest cut, all three players are at the $0.095 mark for the first 1TB per month with some options and variability…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/storage-the-crack-cocaine-of-cloud-computing/