By providing pools of IT resources, along with tools and technologies designed to leverage them collectively, Clouds can instantly and dynamically allocate IT resources to Cloud consumers, on-demand or using the Cloud consumer's direct configuration. This empowers Cloud consumers to scale their Cloud-based IT resources to accommodate processing fluctuations and peaks automatically or manually. Similarly, Cloud-based IT resources can be released (automatically or manually) as processing demands decrease.

The inherent, built-in feature of clouds to provide flexible levels of scalability to IT resources is directly related to the proportional costs benefits mentioned earlier. Besides the evident financial gain to the automated reduction of scaling, the ability of IT resources to always meet and fulfill unpredictable usage demands avoids potential loss of business that can occur when usage thresholds are met.