Google and Panzura have partnered to offer developers 2TB of free storage

Google has partnered with cloud storage startup Panzura to offer developers 2 TB of free storage for a full year, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. It’s the latest move in the continuing battle between competitors like Google and Amazon to dominate the cloud storage market. The new plans are focused more on cloud app developers than end users, who will still want to rely on services like Google Drive or Dropbox for their own storage needs. However, for app developers looking for cloud solutions, Google’s new offer could provide a pretty decent starting point. Getting 2 TB of storage on Amazon, by comparison, would run at least $240 a year, while a similar setup on Microsoft’s cloud system would cost even more.

Google Wednesday fired another shot in the price wars for cloud-computing services, offering businesses more free storage in an effort to compete with industry leader Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud Platform offered two terabytes of free storage for a year, through one of its partners, a startup called Panzura. The move highlights the battle among Google, Amazon and Microsoft to provide companies with remote storage, computing power and other technology services, which reduce companies’ need to buy and run their own equipment. Some industry insiders predict storage will soon be free. By comparison, Amazon offers a service for infrequently accessed data at one cent per gigabyte per month, which would equate to $120 a year for one terabyte of storage. Microsoft’s Azure service offers business the first terabyte of data storage for as little as 2.4 cents a gigabyte per month. “Storage is a race to the bottom on pricing,” said Rajesh Abhyankar, CEO of MediaAgility, a cloud consulting firm that works with Google. “The money will be in software and services that sit and run on top of these companies’ cloud platforms.”Abhyankar said Google’s free storage offer with Panzura is part of an effort to grab business customers from Amazon. “Google is trying really hard to catch up with AWS,” he said. “These types of offers may persuade users to move their data.”