This past week in the cloud has seen a string of notable updates, and the four most interesting highlights come from two of the hottest areas in this area: PaaS and big data.

First up is Microsoft’s Azure Storage price cut.

The company is facing a lot of pressure from competing services, mainly AWS, in addition to many other emerging platforms such as Cloud Foundry. This was made especially true when Amazon announced its latest price cut a few days ago; one of several announced throughout the past two-three years. This week Microsoft decided to retaliate with hourly rate trims of at least 12 percent across several different Azure Storage plans, a move that comes at a time when competing on the technical side is becoming increasingly challenging.

Over at the consumer space, we had a big update from SugarSync, a cloud collaboration service. It strengthened its existing agreement with electronics maker Lenovo with the announcement of a new cloud service that will be offered to users of the latter’s devices, as well as the broader mobile space.

Next up is big data. A new company called Flow is offering up a SaaS that’s designed to get the data closer to apps, while handling the bulk of the process. This vision is not new in the crossroads between cloud and analytics, but is a very interesting innovation in what is still a maturing field. VMware is also looking to get involved in this area, which is why it extended support for the latest Spring release – a framework often leveraged in Hadoop environments. Several plugins have been updated, including one for Android.