Cloud computing offers application vendors, publishers and researchers augmented capacity and an exceptional platform for testing, development and one-off projects, web based applications, parallel or very large batch jobs, scientific computing, and rich media processing.
Agility:
Benchmarking and prototyping in a properly sized, dedicated environment supports agile development for faster time to market. Because the service is on demand, you can start trying your ideas immediately without needing to fully understand the size and scope of the finished product. It will change the way you work.
Elasticity:
Cloud Computing offers the ability to massively scale-up or scale-down the dedicated resources to handle large user volumes, seasonal fluctuations in demand or a large one-time computation. It eliminates the need to plan for maximum capacity in advance and allows applications to programmatically add or remove nodes as needed.
No capital expenditure:
Explore your needs before investing in infrastructure. Computational infrastructure as an operational expense allows for significantly faster deployments and exactly enough capacity for your present needs and your future growth. With the new technology, application vendors can offer faster deployments to their customers and researchers can get faster results without needing months to go through a full cycle of hardware specifications, procurement, and configuration at internal or third party data centers.
Pay-as-you-go pricing:
Allows you to pay only for what you use. Billing for computation resources can be directly and appropriately attributed to the correct customer, project or grant.
Consistency:
Ability to configure an easily deployable, reproducible and shareable computational environment accessible from anywhere in the world from a web browser.
Supports risk-taking:
Eliminates the concern of bringing down the machine or blocking the higher priority work of others. Ability to provide an isolated, temporary development environment for new team members to get up to speed or run new software through rigorous and resource intensive testing.
Green:
Cloud computing uses servers that can be located anywhere in the world to take advantage of renewable energy sources and lower cooling requirements. Shared physical hardware and right-sized machine resource allocation mean less excess capacity consuming energy.