M&A returned to the cloud ecosystem’s agenda last week after Red Hat Inc. bought a low-key outfit called 3scale Inc. that helps companies regulate how their web services are used. Its API management software makes it possible to control who can interact with an application, enforce usage restrictions and scan activity patterns for insights that might help improve operations.

Red Hat plans to incorporate 3scale’s technology into its hugely-popular JBoss middleware suite and make the source-code available for free to developers. The company hopes that lowering the entry barrier will put it in a better position to compete against Apigee Inc., MuleSoft Inc. and the numerous other rivaling API management providers out there. It’s a similar strategy to the one France’s Iliad SA is employing against Amazon Inc.  over in the infrastructure-as-a-service market.

The telco last week unveiled a cloud-based cold storage service that undercuts AWS Glacier with an hourly rate of less than a cent per gigabyte. Moreover, VentureBeat reports that user data is kept in an underground facility located 80 feet below the busy streets of Paris, which provides a level of reliability that usually isn’t available at such a price range. But Iliad should nonetheless expect an uphill battle against Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ firm is constantly rolling out new functionality and lowering its rates in a bid to maintain its lead over the competition.

Meanwhile in the cloud-based collaboration market, Dropbox Inc. is fighting a difficult battle of its own. The company is trying to win over enterprise customers from Box Inc. by adding team-oriented functionality to its file sharing service, which is currently used mainly in the consumer world. Last week, it rolled out a scanning tool that allows workers to quickly sync the contents of physical documents to the cloud using their mobile devices. It’s then possible to regulate who can access those documents using new access controls that were introduced in conjunction.

Image via Geralt