Cost reduction from standardization and automation is a benefit that accrues to the cloud provider, not the cloud users. Additional benefits to cloud providers are:
* High utilization through virtualization and shared resources
* Easier administration
* Fail-in-place operations model

Benefits that accrue to cloud users include:
* On-demand self-service resources provisioning
* Centralized appearance of resources
* Highly available, horizontally scaled applications
* No local backups required

Cloud users can also benefit from new services such as intelligent DNS, which can direct user requests to locations that are using fewer resources.