How does your cloud storage grow? With a scalable plan and a price drop

Consolidating storage into a centrally managed infrastructure resource can make life as a storage architect much easier. But the path to consolidation is fraught with complexity. Data is flowing into your organization constantly from live sources, whether from your company’s customers, employees, partners or the devices and hardware you maintain. All this data sits at different locations owned by different business units, inside various types of storage technologies that aren’t necessarily available the moment you need them for your data storage needs.

But one thing is a constant for most businesses today: The amount of data to be stored just keeps growing. Today we’re announcing the Storage Growth Plan for Google Cloud Storage, a way to provide flexible, ready-when-you-need-it data storage that won’t result in unexpected bills.

Cloud Storage is great at solving the consolidation and the capacity problem of data storage today. It is the unified object storage that powers many Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers, letting you store and move data as needed. You can use Transfer Appliance to get petabytes into Cloud Storage quickly, you can stream data into Cloud Storage with Dataflow, you can even move data from AWS S3 to Cloud Storage with Storage Transfer Service. You pay by the gigabyte-month for the data you are storing in Cloud Storage, and you can store petabytes, exabytes or more. And once it’s in Cloud Storage, integrations across the platform make it easy to expose your data to services like BigQuery, Dataproc and CloudML.

It’s easy to store and use the data in Cloud Storage–but it’s still being created at an astonishing and unpredictable rate. And creation unpredictability means cost unpredictability. We’ve developed the Storage Growth Plan to help enterprise customers manage storage costs and meet the forecasting and predictability that is often asked of IT organizations. It’s a new way to commit to Cloud Storage that protects you from the cost volatility associated with your data storage behavior. Here’s how it works:

1. You commit to at least $10,000 spending per month for 12 months of Cloud Storage usage. This is a fixed amount you will pay each month.

2. You can grow stored data, with no extra charges for usage over your commitment, during those 12 months.

3. At the end of 12 months, you have two choices for renewal.

4. Commit to the next 12 months at whatever your peak usage was. If that is within 30% of your original commitment, all of your previous year’s overage is free. If it is more than 30%, you repay that remainder over the next year.

5. Or, leave the plan and pay for the past year’s overage.

Repeat 12 months at a time for as long as you like.