The roll-out of new applications requires capital and operational expenditures that many companies cannot afford in today's economic climate. With many enterprises delaying and pulling back on new IT infrastructure investments, the idea of using a usage-based (“utility based model) of computing service that doesn't require a capital expenditure and instead uses “pay for what you use” service makes solid business sense. The cloud is fundamentally like using a utility service (e.g. electricity), and paying monthly for the exact usage. Importantly, if more service is needed no new capital expenditures are required. In addition, using current practices, IT managers have to overprovision costly resources (i.e. servers and storage) to ensure that sudden usage spikes are handled smoothly; the cloud eliminates this hidden embedded cost. Bottom line: the cloud eliminates the need to install and run applications in your own data center, alleviating the burden of software acquisition, maintenance, ownership, and support.