An End To The Cloud Storage Price Wars?

Over the past few years, cloud providers have kept slashing their storage price. It seemed the storage price would eventually drop to zero. Of course, storage price is only a small portion of their total cost. The user licenses and features often cost far more than the storage cost. On average, major enterprise cloud providers charge over $150/user/year (compared with DriveHQ's average cost of $20/user/year). The storage cost was merely shifted to the monthly user licenses. It is indeed surprising that Microsoft would suddenly hike its storage cost - OneDrive has officially announced the end of their industry leading 15GB of storage to free user, in addition to a number of other changes with their personal, business, and enterprise level services. One of the most dramatic changes for business/enterprise users will be the astonishing switch from those with unlimited storage, now being reduced to only 1TB!

Now don't get us wrong, a terabyte of storage space is certainly not cutting the average business off at the feet. Though it is fair to assume that many of those with the unlimited plan chose OneDrive precisely for this reason. It will be interesting to see if this has any dramatic effect on the business users on OneDrive. It certainly will reduce the new incoming users, though this is clearly what they are after to reduce the overwhelming 'unpaid' usage on their servers.

One of the more frustrating parts of this change for existing OneDrive users is not only the sudden notice with only 2 weeks forwarning, but the fact that this will apply to ALL existing users, and not just those coming in new. Imagine any coorporation with several tera, or even petabytes of stored data. They will be forced to pay 10-100+ times what they previously were just to maintain their service. It is unlikely that a business in this situation will stay on for long.

Okay, so, what are we doing talking about this? DriveHQ has always been on the lower end when it comes to free storage, offering only 1GB. The direction of the industry is becoming clearer by the moment; companies' that previously spend millions on advertising for there 'phenominal' storage deals are now changing directions as they realize the focus on storage amounts are dramatically decreasing as coorporations begin to more effectively manage their online content. The focus for cloud solutions should now be on the technologies that you build into this storage.

Now, who could have predicted that?