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: 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. Cost calculating These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. What you save or gain with cloud services Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition  32 ✓ 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.