Dive Brief:

• The cloud price wars have migrated from virtual machines to object storage, according to an analysis of cloud pricing by 451 Research.

• Virtual machines have been the traditional battleground for price cuts among cloud providers, but pricing for object storage, a storage architecture that manages data as objects, has dropped 14% in every region over the last year, according to the study. "This is the first time there has been a big price war outside compute, and it reflects object storage’s move into the mainstream," Jean Atelsek, analyst, Digital Economics Unit at 451 Research said in an announcement.

• 451 Research predicts the price wars will move to other areas, particularly databases, over the next 18 months.

Dive Insight:

As cloud technology matures, cloud providers are looking for new areas to create competitive advantage and attract new business. Trimming costs on object storage is the latest area where they are focusing.

It’s all good news for customers looking for a good deal, provided they can compare apples to apples and make sure they are indeed getting more bang for their buck when it comes to object storage.

Even with competition to offer the lowest price, this is still a huge market for cloud providers. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues — including public and private cloud, hardware and software — reached $70 billion in 2016 and continue to grow at a double-digit pace, according to a recent report from Synergy.