Amazon Web Services opening first Canada region in Montreal

Quantum announced Tuesday that its virtual deduplication appliance Q-Cloud Protect is now available as a cloud-based appliance running on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

Just how evident this latest move is occurs when Microsoft cloud platform director of marketing Nicole Herskowitz calls AWS out. It doesn’t come as a major surprise then that Microsoft is now also dropping the prices for some of its virtual machines by between 10 and 17 percent. For instance, it mentions the more value gained through Azure as Azure Dv2 instances – unlike AWS EC2 instances – have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge.

On Thursday, Microsoft parried with price reductions of its own. “Of course, the new region will also be open to existing AWS customers who would like to process and store data in Canada”, he says. In total, AWS has 32 Availability Zones across 12 regions worldwide, and boasts one million customers worldwide. It is licensed on an hourly-basis, enabling customers to pay only for the cloud resources they use as their system grows, cutting capital expenses.

In the end, a price cut or the lowest price per VM does not automatically translate to savings versus another vendor because it all depends on the requirements of the application, Rogers said.

Microsoft’s price cuts focus on its updated D-series instances.

Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group: “You can’t have a conversation about IT (or data protection) modernization without talking about ‘the cloud.’ And certainly one of the more exciting intersections between cloud services and data protection is in the use of off-site data survivability and BC/DR preparedness; ideally as an extension of one’s primary data protection strategy and architecture”.

At the beginning of the year, AWS lowered prices for EC2, which was followed by Google claiming that its prices are up to 41% less expensive than AWS and now we have price cuts from Azure.

TCL forecasts that average public cloud pricing will fall by 14% over the four year period from 2016 to 2020 – but with less intense price competition over the period.

According to the report, released this week by Tariff Consultancy (TCL), average entry-level cloud computing prices declined by about 66 percent over the two-year period ending in November 2015.

Public cloud prices have continued to drop based on quantities of scale.

Google then fired back with a blog post this week arguing that it offered better value for money than AWS. For example, AWS is famous for its user-friendly tools, which allow buyers to deploy applications in the cloud faster than on other platforms.