UKCloud Cuts Prices To Fend Off Big US Players In The Public Sector
Cloud price wars keep driving service costs for public sector companies down
UKCloud has sliced its cloud storage service prices for public sector customers to challenge the services offered by the big players like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This is the tenth round of price reductions according the the company, and will apply to its Cloud Storage and its VMware-based Enterprise Compute Cloud services; two of its most popular cloud offerings.
The price reductions, measuring at a 66 percent drop, are part of UKCloud’s mission to attract public sector organisations in the UK undergoing digital transformation projects, in the face of competition presence by major US firms with a global presence.
Cost cutting cloud
“We’re delighted that our continued growth means that we can pass on these savings to our public sector customers,” said Simon Hansford, CEO at UKCloud.
“While we’re now well known for introducing price cuts on a regular basis, our tenth wave of reductions coincides with cost increases from other providers, most notably US corporations. This means that not only are our services genuinely UK sovereign and as such, our customers’ data is never subject to far reaching foreign data privacy issues, but they are also more cost competitive than ever before.”
UKCloud noted that customers with large-scale storage needs will only have to pay 15p per GB of storage space per month, which it claims is significantly cheaper than the services of leading US cloud providers. While smaller customers will be able to enjoy price cuts of 80 percent, which translates to 9p per GB per month.
With US cloud firms trying to push into the UK public sector market, UKCloud’s price cuts appear to be a necessary mode to keep competitive, and as the big cloud players gain certification for use with public sector regulations and data protection, as well as establish more regional datacentres that give them the scope to wrest business around from local cloud companies.
However, the ambitions of the government and its Government Digital Service (GDS) department to create common platforms and digital services for use across Whitehall and the wider government, is likely to open up increasing amounts of opportunities for cloud firms to sell to the UK’s public sector.
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