<Li> Cost reductions are claimed by cloud providers . A public - cloud delivery model converts capital expenditures (e.g., buying servers) to operational expenditure . This purportedly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third party and need not be purchased for one - time or infrequent intensive computing tasks . Pricing on a utility computing basis is "fine - grained", with usage - based billing options . As well, less in - house IT skills are required for implementation of projects that use cloud computing . The e-FISCAL project's state - of - the - art repository contains several articles looking into cost aspects in more detail, most of them concluding that costs savings depend on the type of activities supported and the type of infrastructure available in - house . </Li> <Li> Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they use (e.g., PC, mobile phone). As infrastructure is off - site (typically provided by a third - party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect to it from anywhere . </Li> <Li> Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, because they do not need to be installed on each user's computer and can be accessed from different places (e.g., different work locations, while travelling, etc .). </Li> <Li> Multitenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for: <Ul> <Li> centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc .) </Li> <Li> peak - load capacity increases (users need not engineer and pay for the resources and equipment to meet their highest possible load - levels) </Li> <Li> utilisation and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10--20% utilised . </Li> </Ul> </Li>

In terms of storage or processing what is the cloud (essentially)