Making good on its Amazon price-matching promise from a year ago, Microsoft plans to cut the price of its Windows Azure cloud storage following a cut by Amazon earlier this week.

Microsoft will be dropping prices on its Block Blobs Storage and Disks/Page Blobs Storage effective March 13, according to a January 24 post on the Windows Azure blog. Microsoft plans to make the storage price cuts available worldwide, which, company officials contend, will mean that Azure storage "will be less expensive than AWS in many regions."

Amazon announced price cuts on its Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Simple Storage Service (S3) on January 21.

Windows Azure General Manager Steven Martin explained the price-cut details in the post:

"We are matching AWS’ lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS reducing prices by up to 20% and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide. For Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage we are reducing prices by up to 28%. We are also reducing the price of Azure Storage transactions by 50%."

Microsoft officials said back in April 2013 that Microsoft would match Amazon Web Services on price for all "commodity" services , including compute, storage and bandwidth. To benefit from the cuts, users need to make monthly commitments to Azure for either six months or twelve months, officials said.

Update (January 26): Microsoft officials said there is no longer a minimum commitment requirement that users must meet in order to take advantage of its Amazon price-matching cuts.