## What you save or gain with cloud services 

Some hard costs are involved with cloud services, but understanding your business needs and growth strategies helps you put the costs into perspective. Having the ability to pay on an as-needed basis for servers, storage, and other services, for example, can give your company a needed boost for implementing innovative solutions with far less economic risk than buying the required infrastructure upfront. 

While business and IT come to the cloud for different reasons and with different goals, both see the cloud’s overall potential: 

✓ Lasting customer relationships:  Implementing an online collaboration for your customers and partners can lead to business innovation and transformation that far outweighs the costs associated with the implementation. 

✓ IT without traditional boundaries and restrictions: Whereas traditional IT can trap technology and information in silos, cloud services simplify access and help connect people across the enterprise (and beyond). 

✓ Improved speed and agility:  Cloud services help you increase the delivery of IT computing resources. Whether your goal is to be first to market with a new product or simply providing the best, most-responsive customer service, speedy yet flexible IT is a necessity. 

✓ Transformation of the economics of IT:  Self-service and deployment help speed delivery of new offerings and services to your customers. 

## Cost calculating 

One approach to estimating costs is to first examine your expected workloads in detail and then use an estimator tool to calculate real-world costs of running those workloads in the cloud. 

