There’s a new pricing war in cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service offerings among Amazon, Google and Microsoft. 

Hospitals and health IT upstarts evaluating IaaS might want to take note that Microsoft just dropped the price of Azure Standard Support in what appears to be an effort to undercut rival Google and keep pace with Amazon Web Services. 

Hospitals can now purchase Azure Standard Support for $100 a month – that’s down from the $300 monthly ticket. Microsoft also noted that government customers would enjoy a slightly bigger price break from $375 per month to $125 per month.

The software giant threw in a second perk: It shortened its guaranteed response time from two hours down to one for critical cases. 

Taken together, those updates mean Microsoft matches Amazon’s AWS offering exactly at $100 per month with promised response within the hour. 

Google’s basic support, meanwhile, runs $150 per month with a four-hour response time. 

Your move, Google. 

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com