Increased Scalability

By providing pools of IT resources, along with tools and technologies designed to leverage them collectively, clouds can instantly and dynamically allocate IT resources to cloud consumers, on-demand or via the cloud consumer’s direct confi guration. This empowers cloud consumers to scale their cloud-based IT resources to accommodate processing fluctuations and peaks automatically or manually. Similarly, cloud-based IT resources can be released (automatically or manually) as processing demands decrease.

A simple example of usage demand fluctuations throughout a 24 hour period is provided in Figure 1

Figure 1 – An example of an organization’s changing demand for an IT resource over the course of a day.

The inherent, built-in feature of clouds to provide flexible levels of scalability to IT resources is directly related to the aforementioned proportional costs benefit. Besides the evident financial gain to the automated reduction of scaling, the ability of IT resources to always meet and fulfill unpredictable usage demands avoids potential loss of business that can occur when usage thresholds are met.