Google Cloud, a division of Alphabet, has announced its decision to waive network fees for users looking to transfer their data to an alternative cloud provider.
According to a Reuters news report, traditionally, major cloud services like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) impose charges based on the volume of data transferred during the transition between providers.
On its website, Google Cloud stated that the storage transfer service is priced at $0.0125 per GB for Agent-based transfers to or from file systems. Customers typically incur transfer charges when moving data between Cloud Storage buckets.
This practice has come under scrutiny, with Britain’s media regulator Ofcom expressing concerns about the potential deterrent effect on customers seeking to switch providers. In response, the country’s antitrust authority launched an investigation into the dominance of tech giants in the UK cloud market.
Google Cloud’s website specifies that the Storage Transfer Service generates charges only for bytes transferred successfully to the destination. If the service retries a failed object transfer, the initial bytes moved on the failed request are not billed. Similarly, incremental transfers do not incur charges for unchanged files from the previous transfer.
Effective Thursday, the removal of data transfer fees applies to all Google Cloud customers globally, indicating a customer-centric approach to addressing migration challenges within the cloud computing industry.