I have to confess that a few years ago I was one of the most outspoken opponents of the cloud. At that time, cloud was really nothing more than a fancy word for outsourcing and there seemed to be a very real danger that huge numbers of IT professionals would lose their jobs to rampant cloud outsourcing. As is the case with everything in IT however, the cloud has evolved. Cloud services are no longer about completely outsourcing corporate IT. There are very real, and legitimate use cases for the cloud.
The biggest selling point today is that cloud services reduce costs on things like server hardware and server maintenance. Rather than an organization having to purchase physical devices, they are able to lease space on a cloud provider’s hardware. This sharing of hardware resources saves money because no one single organization is forced to incur the costs of a full server.