Google Cloud makes cloud costs more manageable

Google Cloud comes up with a new payment plan that fixes the monthly price of its services for an entire year. This makes it easier to identify and manage the costs that companies incur for the cloud service. It also makes it easier to budget, because companies can better predict the costs they incur.

With this plan, Google is responding to the growing concerns of CFOs about the costs associated with cloud services. The Storage Growth Plan for Google Cloud Storage not only provides insight into the costs, but also makes them easier to manage. Not only is there a monthly fixed rate, there is also a clear agreement on any additional costs.

Partly flexible

The costs of cloud storage can vary considerably. They depend, among other things, on the location of data, but also on other things. For example, creating and managing backups, analytics and machine learning can increase the cost of a cloud service considerably. In addition, companies also collect a great deal of data and there are occasionally significant peak times. For such a peak moment, which is not always easy to predict, companies have to pay extra.

This is changing with Google’s Storage Growth Plan, which is more in line with the way companies are used to buying IT infrastructure. Dave Nettleton, product manager for Google Cloud Storage, has announced that this change has been made for companies that have a certain budget and want to avoid any surprises along the way. That works as follows:

1. A customer signs a twelve-month contract and pays $10,000 (€8,847) each month for the cloud service.
2. During those twelve months, there are no additional costs associated with the use of additional storage capacity.
3. Once the twelve months have passed, the customer can extend the contract for a further year. The costs of this new contract depend on the peak use during the previous year. If the maximum peak was less than 30 percent of the original storage plan, everything remains the same. If the peak was higher, this is regarded as a new lower limit.

In this way, Google makes the costs of its cloud service more predictable and companies can still flexibly transfer their IT workloads to the cloud.