Surges in application usage are defined as application demand above the baseline levels of the business activity. Periodic surges due to unforeseen mission requirements or seasonal requirements in application usage are caused by predictable increases in business activity, or unexpected temporary increases.

Cloud Computing is used to address periodic surges, whether predicted or not, by dynamically increasing resources as necessary, and decreasing when they are no longer needed.

Cloud Computing removes the need to acquire IT infrastructure that sits idle or is underutilized.

By migrating certain applications or services to a Cloud Computing environment, the government maintains a small persistent footprint and deploy on-demand resources as required. This allows the government to avoid idle server costs while accommodating traffic surges.