The collective industry effort to displace Amazon from its dominant position in the public cloud intensified last week as rivals expanded the competition over enterprise spending to more workloads. Google led the charge with the launch of a dedicated service for storing archival data.

Most of the mundane historical information that organizations stash away for record-keeping purposes never get used, but the risk of a lawsuit or a regulatory audit requires keeping the entire repository readily accessible. That often comes at the cost of increased overhead that is difficult to justify for such low-priority data, an equation that the search giant promises to simplify.

The new service offers to keep files within a few seconds’ reach at the same price Amazon charges for offline disks that take hours to start serving requests, giving Google an edge that it hopes will entice customers away from Amazon. But that’s merely the latest competitive challenge for the retail-turned-cloud-giant. It’s also dealing with renewed rivalry from managed service providers.

That front returned to the spotlight last week after SingleHop Inc. acquired Server Intellect Inc. in a landmark stroke of consolidation that leaves the industry with another one-stop-shop for hosting virtual workloads. The ability to outsource an on-premise application without having to change the management scheme when moving to one of the major public clouds is appealing for traditional organizations at the center of the cloud competition.

The importance of sustaining existing technology investments in the enterprise is also playing into the hands of SUSE Linux Gmbh, which is exploiting the widespread use of its operating system to push ahead in the OpenStack ecosystem. The company’s distribution of the cloud platform received a major update last week that introduced the ability to incorporate existing servers into a cluster during the initial installation and new virtual networking options for controlling how those nodes communicate.