Microsoft has done it again, raising the free storage limit for all customers on OneDrive to 15 GB!! That’s up from 7 GB that was rolled out earlier this year. This announcement is for personal OneDrive and not OneDrive for Business – which has been at 1 TB of storage since April.
Comparing to the other vendors in this space, and Microsoft is now tied with Google for the lowest cost at the 100 GB level.
| Consortium | Number of Members | Premier Financial Services Members | Leader(s) | Start Date | Focus/Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R3CEV | 84 | DTCC, American Express, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, TD Bank, BBVA, Bank of New York Mellon, Northern Trust, HSBC, Barclays | R3, CEV | 2014 | General-purpose platform and technology to design and deliver advanced distributed ledger technologies to the financial services market. |
| Digital Asset Holdings | 15 | Deutsche Borse, J.P. Morgan, DTCC, ABN AMRO, Goldman Sachs, Santander, Citi, IBM | DAH | 2014 | Capital markets – post-trade settlement. Building distributed, encrypted straight through processing tools to improve efficiency, security, compliance, and settlement speed. |
| Hyperledger Project | 142 | J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, UBS, BBVA, Bank of New York Mellon | Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco, Intel, SWIFT, DAH | 2015 | General purpose blockchain. Open source collaborative effort based on IBM’s Fabric codebase, which was created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration that includes leaders in finance, banking, the internet of things (IoT), supply chain, manufacturing, and technology. The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger as a Collaborative Project under the foundation. |
| Ethereum | 116 | J.P. Morgan, Santander, BNY Mellon, BBVA, Bank of New York Mellon | Microsoft, Intel | 2017 | Considering a more distributed approach to self-management rather than the more traditional leadership structure adopted by competing blockchain consortia like R3CEV and Hyperledger. Offers smart contract features that contain a virtual machine, executing peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency known as Ether. |
| Ripple | 75 | UBS, Standard Chartered, Santander, CIBC, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), MUFG, Mizuho | Google, IDG Capital Partners | 2012 | Payments. A real-time gross settlement system (RTGS), currency exchange and remittance network by the company of the same name. The Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) or Ripple protocol is built upon a distributed open-source Internet protocol, consensus ledger and native currency called XRP (ripples). |
| Kinakuta | 35 | Ethereum Foundation | Microsoft, ConsenSys | 2016 | Working group dedicated to improving smart contracts security. |
Microsoft is also slashing it’s prices on Office 365:
- Home – $9.99 /month, 1 TB per person, up to 5 people
- Personal – $6.99 /month
- University – $79.99 /4 years
