Microsoft has made several updates to its Azure cloud services in recent days. These include general availability for the Azure Security Center for IoT, building of new datacenters, and the launching of the first available African region for Power BI Embedded.

Now, the tech giant has announced that it will be decreasing the price of its Azure Archive Storage offerings by up to 50% in some regions. With this move, Microsoft aims to highlights its commitment to providing the most cost-effective storage access.

Archive Storage is primarily a cloud storage service for rarely accessed data. However, it still includes three different access tiers, namely, hot, cool, and archive, based upon the frequency of access required for stored data. This applies to Binary Large OBject (Blob) storage with a variety of pricing tiers. The pricing for each tier also depends upon the type of features required by a customer, the kind of storage redundancy options, region, and more.

At the moment, the 'recommended' data storage prices in the U.S. range from $0.00099/GB per month to $0.18/GB per month, determined by the type of access tier, as well as the variety of aforementioned factors. In comparison, the lowest price point in European regions is still the same, though it may rise to $0.195/GB per month for premium offerings. For the separate UK regions, however, the lowest tier will still cost $0.0018, and storage pricing can increase up to $0.188/GB per month, slightly higher than in the United States. Operation and data transfer prices generally scale similarly based upon region, though these can be observed more carefully by checking out the full pricing details for the service here.

Microsoft has also cited a recent study with the aim to satisfy its current customers, noting that they can achieve a 112 percent return-on-investment (ROI) by moving their data to the Archive tier. Over the past year, the tech giant has added support for Archive Storage in Australia East, Australia Southeast, East Asia, Southeast Asia, UK West, UK South, and several more regions. This makes it available to a total of 29 regions all over the world.