2. It can provide an almost immediate access to hardware resources, with no upfront capital investments for users, leading to a faster time to market in many businesses. Treating IT as an operational expense (in industry-speak, employing an ‘Op-ex’ as opposed to a ‘Cap-ex’ model) also helps in dramatically reducing the upfront costs in corporate computing. For example, many of the promising new Internet startups like 37 Signals, Jungle Disk, Gigavox, SmugMug and others were realized with investments in information technology that are orders of magnitude lesser than that required just a few years ago. The cloud becomes an adaptive infrastructure that can be shared by different end users, each of whom might use it in very different ways. The users are completely separated from each other, and the flexibility of the infrastructure allows for computing loads to be balanced on the fly as more users join the system (the process of setting up the infrastructure has become so standardized that adding computing capacity has become almost as simple as adding building blocks to an existing grid). The beauty of the arrangement is that as the number of users goes up, the demand load on the system gets more balanced in a stochastic sense, even as its economies of scale expand.