Google Drive blows past other online storage services by tripling free space to fifteen GB and cutting prices around the board.

Google, like other companies offering online storage, still faces doubts in regards to the security of cloud computing following last summer’s revelations concerning the reach of the National Security Agency. But it’s doing its best to reassure customers and to draw new ones.

Following a declaration this month by Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps, that “the cloud might be as safe as — or in lots of cases, safer than — storing data on-premise,” Google is creating a financial case for the cloud. The corporate lowered the price of Google Drive storage substantially Thursday.

“Today, way to quite a few recent infrastructure improvements, we’re ready to make it more cost-effective with a purpose to keep everything safe and straightforward to arrive on any device, from anywhere,” Google product management director Scott Johnston wrote in a blog post.

Google Drive now offers 15 GB of storage at no cost, up from 5 GB. Its paid storage tiers are actually 100 GB for $24 a year, down from $60; 1 TB for $120 a year, down from $600; and 10 TB for $1,200 a year, with larger allotments available.

[Will your cloud project succeed? Read Enterprise Cloud Adoption: 5 Hard Truths.]

By comparison, Microsoft OneDrive (previously called SkyDrive) offers 7 GB without cost, 50 GB for $25 a year, 100 GB for $50 a year, and 200 GB for $100 a year.

Apple iCloud offers 5 GB of storage without charge, a ten-GB upgrade for $20 a year, a 20-GB upgrade for $40 a year, and a 50-GB upgrade for $100 a year.

Dropbox offers 2 GB for free of charge, with 100 GB for $99 a year, 200 GB for $199 a year, and 500 GB for $499 a year.

Amazon Web Services’ Glacier archival backup service costs $0.01 per GB a month, or 1 TB for $120 a year. That is the same because the new Google Drive price, excluding the Glacier Archive price of $0.05 per 1,000 requests.

Bitcasa offers as much as 20 GB free or 1 TB for $99 a year.

Those who would rather buy a 1-TB SATA harddrive than trust the cloud can accomplish that for approximately $65 at the moment. To approximate the redundancy assumed in cloud storage, you’ll want to buy two. That could be comparable price-wise to Google Drive, but it surely would even be less secure inside the event of on-site disaster or theft.

Storage calculations with these services aren’t always straightforward. Apple, as an instance, lets users store backup, documents, and mail at no cost. Google doesn’t count docs, sheets, or slides documents toward storage quotas.

But if security matters greater than price, have a look at the zero-knowledge backup provider SpiderOak, which offers 2 GB free and increments of 100 GB for $100 a year. “Zero knowledge” suggests that SpiderOak doesn’t make a copy of the encryption key that unlocks encrypted files. That may not be enough to discourage a determined intelligence agency, but it’s better protection than you’re going to get from a provider that may be compelled by court order to decrypt files using its own key.

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Thomas Claburn have been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications resembling New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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