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In the current digital age, businesses are increasingly migrating to the cloud to leverage flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. However, this transition comes with its own challenges, primarily managing and optimizing cloud costs to ensure a high return on investment. Effective cloud cost optimization strategies are essential for businesses looking to maximize their cloud investment without compromising performance or capability. This article explores key strategies to help businesses achieve cost efficiency in their cloud operations.

Google Drive has came a long way, from first rumors in 2009 to the public launch in 2012. Now, the Big-G is all geared up to offer another milestone in online cloud backup space with "full-pc backup and sync" feature to it's Google Drive service.

Scheduled for release on June 28th, 2017, the "Backup and Sync" service from Google will help everyday users back up files and photos from their computers, so they’re safe and accessible from anywhere. Backup and Sync is the latest version of Google Drive for Mac/PC, which is now integrated with the Google Photos desktop uploader. As such, it will respect any current Drive for Mac/PC settings in the Admin console.

SugarSync stopped offering Free usage-tier some time ago, and has now started purging old free accounts. SugarSync is ditching free-users including users like me who promoted SugarSync in there early days and earned free referral bonus (140+GB in my case). This is not all, these guys are so unprofessional that when contacted about the issue few months ago I was told that since I have referral bonus my account will be ok and will not be purged in February, which was not the case. Thankfully I received an automated account-purge notice by email and contacting them again I was told that the earlier support staff was mistaken and all free accounts will get purged.

With account cancellation getting near-by I was left with the task of moving my data to alternative free cloud-storage services, since I am on a slow internet connection downloading and re-uploading was not an option. Thankfully, there are free-to-try services allowing cloud-to-cloud data transfers which comes handy in situations like this where users are left in the lurch.

Box.com, the popular cloud storage service provider released their brand new, completely rebuilt App for iPhone and iPad. The new app is not only faster, simpler and more immersive to use but also comes with an offer of 50GB free storage for life to users who download the app in the next 30 days.

The fact that more than 20+ million users, 200,000+ companies including 97% of the Fortune 500 use Box as their cloud storage provider is more then enough to grab this exciting free storage offer before it's too late. Box makes it easy to store, manage and work with all your files and documents wherever you are - on the web, from your desktop and on your iPhone and iPad.

While Google Drive is no-way near the massive offering of free cloud storage like 10 TB from weiyun it does offer an excellent streamlined document editing, sharing and storage solution to Gmail users. Google has two great news for users, first they are giving away the popular Quickoffice mobile application to open and edit Microsoft® Office documents across your Apple iOS and Google Android devices for free and also topping up the offering with another perk by giving away an additional 10GB of free cloud storage space on your "Google Drive" account if you link the two by September 26, 2013.

Recently flickr upgraded free image storage quota to a full Terabyte, but now Chinese tech company Tencent has played their card taking the game to a whole new level. The company announced a shocking 10TB worth of free storage on their cloud storage service (Weiyun) for everyone, the best part is you get native mobile apps for Apple iOS and Google Android platforms to access the storage on your mobile devices.

Days after Google+ Photo annoucement, one of the oldest, leading photo-storage service flickr announced some big changes which will please it's users.

The service will remain free as earlier and will now offer one terabyte of online storage under the zero payment plan, the interface has also been revamped and is now more attractive and easier to use. Users will also be able to share photos in their original quality at high-resolution. Another, welcome advancement is the introduction of native mobile apps for Apple iOS and Google Android which allows the "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, and any follower" scenario.

Cloud sync and backup niche is already crowded with big players like SugarSync, DropBox and SkyDrive. Adding another option to these offerings, popular remote desktop access service LogMeIn has came up with there very own cloud syncing solution - Cubby.

One thing you will instantly notice about Cubby is that, it's an well designed and easy-to-use cloud backup and sync solution. The service allows users to share digital content across all their computers, tablets, smartphones or anything connected to internet via an web-browser. Apart from the usual 5GB free storage (with upto 25GB referral limit) and other cloud backup and sync functionality, Cubby features DirectSync allowing syncing across devices which does not count against users cloud storage, public and private sharing and the ability to sync-n-backup any folder of user choice.

Online storage of your documents and media files not only provides a secure backup but also enables faster sharing and anywhere access.

Almost all popular cloud services like SugarSync, DropBox, SkyDrive offer a free usage tier with paid upgrades for higher storage usage. However, a new cloud service provider BookMyCloud is offering Unlimited storage and bandwidth in the cloud with various advanced features like Multiple Repositories for Multiple Departments/Projects, unlimited virtual folders, unlimited password protected shared folders, publicly downloadable file-links with expiry, ability to view and edit documents online and support for custom domains and free sub-domains to access your online virtual disk.

The interface is simple to use and streamlined with drag-n-drop support, view-n-edit support for documents, code and image files.

Sadly, BeeCloud - the only cloud backup solution offering a whooping 500+ GB free online storage went out of the business recently. However, not exactly a cloud backup service provider a new service "JumboFiles" do offer their free account users a generous 500 GB of online file storage space.

The service is more like a online file-locker like Hotfile, Megaupload and Rapidshare and offers users free 500GB account to store files with 1GB size-limit per file, with support for resumeable downloads and download accelerators.