Financial Gains of Cloud Computing

I read probably 10-20 articles daily about the cost savings of cloud computing. So many of them. This is definitely an area of consideration when making the migration to the cloud for your business.

However I would like to see more analysts talk about the efficiency gains regarding performance and generally meeting the demands of your customers. There are a lot of savings and improvements in this area.

This is the biggest area of benefit I see for companies after making the migration in my experience. Initially IT costs appear to go up. Because they find they actually needed more infrastructure than they had internally. This is primarily for small businesses making the jump.

Their current infrastructure was probably running at or near capacity. And when they had a traffic or usage spike they were scrambling to keep things operational.

So when making the jump to cloud computing, with more power at their finger tips they were able to dial in the exact infrastructure that was needed.

Also you need to play around with different configurations for redundancy, load-balancing, backups, etc. So you tend to have more instances running than you really need. This bumps the costs up initially.

However once you get your footing you can narrow down the number of instances to exactly the load you need to handle...and you have the infastructure to scale as your needs grow.

So before you see cost benefits, you see performance and general client delivery efficiencies that you didn't see before. Where are the cost benefits of this?