Microsoft follows cloud storage rivals by slashing Azure costs

Microsoft has confirmed its will cut prices for its Windows Azure Storage cloud offering by as much as 28 percent.

The discount, which takes effect from 12 December, comes on the back of similar cuts by cloud rivals Amazon Web Services and Google.

“This follows our March 8 2012 reduction of 12 percent furthering our commitment to best overall value in the industry,” wrote Stephen Martin's Microsoft head of cloud computing on a company blog.

Prices for Azure Storage start at $0.095 per GB per month for the first 1TB of data stored using Microsoft's geographically redundant service. This service provides more than 400 miles of separation between replicated data.

For customers willing to have less dispersed replication, prices start at $0.07 per GB per month for the first 1TB of storage.

Customers needing more storage can expect to pay less.

The move comes as competition in the cloud storage market intensifies.

Microsoft claimed to be making significant progress in attracting customers. It now says its has over four trillion objects stored in its Azure Storage cloud and receives an average of 270,000 requests processed per second, and a peak of 880,000 requests per second.

Earlier this year, Microsoft's Azure platform suffered an embarrassing outage, which saw high profile sites including the government's G-Cloud service knocked offline.

Microsoft's problems stemmed from a software bug, which failed to account for this year's Leap Day.