"The basic characteristics of a hosted cloud are Provisioning, Scalability, Billing, and Interfaces. Provisioning refers to the ability to add additional services including computer and storage when necessary to support the company's business activity, and then remove them when they are not needed. Scalability is growing the hosted services as the business grows, without any interruptions or downtime. Billing is important because it needs to be flexible and adjust according to what services are provisioned during the billing period and what volume discounts are applied as the environment scales. Finally, the interface is how the users access computing services and resources. It needs to be both user-friendly and compatible with a variety of devices, including computers with different operating systems and mobile devices, from anywhere across the globe."