Google offers Apps users more storage at a price

DAYS AFTER Google wiped 150,000 Gmail accounts clean, it is offering to sell managed storage to Google Apps users.

Google's User Managed Storage will offer Google Apps users the ability to rent disk space, from 20GB up to 1TB, at prices ranging from $5 to $256 per year. The aim is to offer the extra storage for Google's various data sharing services such as Google Docs, Picasa or Blogger.

While Google allows the extra storage to be used for many of its own services, it cannot be used to increment Gmail storage. The firm said that User Managed Storage accounts cannot be pooled, so users wanting more than 1TB of space will simply have to wait.

Google also confirms that any space purchased will have the same ownership policy as other data in the Google Apps account. This means that if firms purchase extra space for Google Apps users, the firm, not the employee will retain rights over the data.

Google Apps users will be hoping that the firm won't suffer a repeat of the Gmail fiasco that led to 150,000 Gmail users losing their emails. That outage highlighted the reliance of users on cloud computing firms such as Google to provide stable and reliable services.

As Google and other cloud service providers offer more products, they might have to consider offering service level agreements in order to meet user needs. µ