Institutional benefits

• Reduced investment in technology infrastructure: Cloud services are on vendors' servers, not Cornell's.
• Able to scale quickly: The cloud lets Cornell get resources when needed and scale up and down as demand changes.
• Service on demand: Cornell buys only what it needs, when it is needed. The cloud relieves us of having to plan for and anticipate needs far ahead of time.
• A la carte: Cornell purchases just what it wants or will use. This is in comparison to the old model in which we might buy a system and pay for unwanted or unimplemented features just to get the desired features and functions.
• Business agility: Cornell can change solutions and providers because it is not walking away from a huge investment in technology, trained personnel, etc.
• Economies of scale: Their high volume of business allows companies like Google to host millions of email accounts less expensively than Cornell can host thousands. By bulking up its systems, Google and similar players can serve the globe and run at full capacity 24X7, making their investment affordable to the company and the service affordable to customers.                    
• Reclaim resources to focus on core business: In higher education, IT is a means not an end. Cloud services let us worry less about system upgrades and disaster recovery since we aren't responsible for the service delivery, and focus more on things that differentiate Cornell--its education, research and outreach missions.

Individual benefits

• Cloud services are leading to positive customer experiences:
  • They are easy to use; we are comfortable with them after having experience with Gmail and similar services.
  • They are accessible via web through a variety of end-user devices: PCs, mobile.
  • They let us move quickly: Services use dashboards, interfaces and templates that are easy for end users to manage and set up on their own: for example, setting up blogs with Cornell's blog service or a survey with Qualtrics. There is no need to wait around for an expert to set something up. Services are perceived as quick and responsive.
• Cornell's cloud service strategy could ultimately lead to more applications for users to choose from: As costs come down, it may be affordable to offer more applications, even if there is overlap in functionality, so that individuals can choose just the right tool for their needs.