Key Advantages of a Cloud Model

You can scale up and down very rapidly—Whether you are running applications for millions of constituents or supporting the critical elements of government operations, the Cloud provides rapid access to flexible, low-cost IT resources. With Cloud computing, you do not need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, you can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources you need to power your newest bright idea or operate your standard IT department operations. With Cloud computing, you can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use.

The following five bullets cite additional advantages and benefits of adopting Cloud computing:

• Trade capital expense for variable expense: Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can use Cloud computing and only pay when you consume computing resources, and only pay for how much you consume.
• Benefit from massive economies of scale: By using Cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers are aggregated in the Cloud, Cloud computing providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale which translates into lower pay as you go prices.
• Stop guessing about capacity: Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With Cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes’ notice.
• Increase speed and agility: In a Cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only ever a click away, which means you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.
• Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers: Focus on projects that are core to your organization, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking and powering servers.