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Price cuts are a common occurrence in the cloud computing industry. The big cloud service providers have all steadily been bringing their prices down, but the industry still has long way to go before cloud costs become so compelling that other modes of infrastructure management simply do not make any sense.

A recent report by 451 Research shows that the cloud computing price war has moved on beyond the traditional Virtual Machine (VM) price battleground to object storage.

The research firm says that object storage pricing has declined by 14% over the past 12 months compared to a 5% drop in VM prices.

The research firm adds that VMs are not the loss leaders, as some in the industry make them out to be, becausemargins for VMs easily cross30%. If this is true, then we can expect prices to start coming down sharply over the next few years as the industry scales up withmore and more companies opting for cloud computing solutions.

Heres a quick look at some of our earlier coverage on price cuts:

As the shift from compute discounting moves towards compute and object storage price cuts, its going to be increasingly difficult for potential cloud customers to figure out who the cheaper cloud computing services provider is, as 451 Research points out.

While thats not necessarily a bad thing because overall costs are going down anyway, it is important for CSPs to now start differentiating themselves in areasother than pricing. Other factors will soon come to the forefront of marketing cloud services to enterprise and business customers. No longer will pricing be the only consideration.

Cloud computing is clearly still a buyers market, where providers will go to any length to acquire a customer. As such, this is the best time to move into a cloud-based solution rather than continue to invest in in-house infrastructure.

And thats also why hybrid is being touted as the next big cloud computing deployment model: large enterprises simply dont see the sheer cost advantage of a public cloud solution yet (and the operative word is yet), but hybrid gives them elasticity, while reducing their ongoing spend on upgrading their existing one-premise infrastructure.

Thanks for reading our work! We invite you to check out ourEssentials of CloudComputingpage, which covers the basics of cloud computing, itscomponents, variousdeployment models, historical, current andforecast datafor the cloud computing industry, and evenaglossaryof cloud computing terms.

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Cloud Computing Price Cuts Move from Virtual Machines to Object ... - 1redDrop