"There's very little difference between a cloud environment and a traditional data center from an infrastructure standpoint. The key differences are how the resources are accessed and who is responsible for managing them. In a traditional data center, the organization is responsible for all aspects of the IT environment. These include acquiring the resources, managing them, updating them, and maintaining them. In a cloud environment, the organization purchases the services on an as-needed basis. This reduces their initial investment, allows them to scale up or down as needed, and provides them access to resources they may not be able to afford. The tradeoff between the two environments is that the cloud is often less expensive, whereas the traditional data center provides the organization with more control and better security."