Company A's IT department has a hosting platform specifically for systems used by the company's large marketing department. This platform provides critical, high-availability hosted IT resources and services. However, the IT department has started to receive complaints about the time it takes to start new marketing campaigns, primarily due to how long it takes to provision new servers within this platform. Also, as a result of a recent set of mergers and acquisitions, the consumers of the services hosted by this platform have become more distributed, with service consumers accessing services from a large variety of locations, and with increasingly different types of devices.

In response to these complaints, Company A is considering using a cloud-based hosting platform. Which specific characteristics of a cloud will be helpful for Company A to address its problems?