Microsoft is significantly cutting its cloud storage prices, making it the latest shot in a burgeoning cloud storage price war.

Microsoft this week said in a blog post that on Dec. 12 it will cut its Windows Azure Storage prices by as much as 28 percent.

This follows a 12-percent cut in Windows Azure Storage pricing that went into effect in March, wrote Steven Martin, general manager for Windows Azure business planning, in the blog.

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Microsoft's move comes on the heels of similar moves by rivals Google and Amazon Web Services.

The latest price war started on Nov. 26 when Google cut pricing for its Cloud Storage offering by 20 percent. That was followed two days later by AWS, which cut its cloud storage pricing by 25 percent, a move it unveiled at its AWS re: Invent partner conference. Google then followed up with an additional 10-percent cut on Nov. 29.

With its upcoming price cut, Windows Azure cloud storage costs will range 9.5 cents per GB per month for up to a total capacity of 1 TB to 5.5 cents per GB per month for capacities of over 4,000 TB per month. Those prices are for geographically redundant storage, which maintains replica copies of the data at least 400 miles from where the first copy is stored.

For locally redundant replicas, the cost per GB per month ranges from 7.0 cents to 3.7 cents or less, Martin wrote.

The three companies are jockeying for position in one of the fastest-growing parts of the IT business. Analyst firm IDC in November reported that the U.S. public IT cloud service market will likely hit $43.2 billion by 2016, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5 percent from the $18.5 billion IDC estimated for 2011.

IDC said storage is the fastest growing part of the public IT cloud service market.

PUBLISHED DEC. 7, 2012