One of the benefits of cloud based infrastructures is the ability to leverage them quickly to meet customer demand, and to scale them to meet the load.

Interestingly enough, such a situation happened recently in regard to the memorial service for Michael Jackson.   The cash strapped city of Los Angeles had to spend a lot of money to provide security etc for the event, so set up a website so fans could donate money to cover the expense.

Unfortunately, they failed to predict the load, and the the volume of fans caused the website to crash.  I would imagine they missed out on significant donations because of this crash.

Similarly, the website also crashed when fans wanted to apply for tickets.  I do not know what application or infrastructure was used for these two purposes, but its a good guess that they tried to use their regular infrastructure for normal events in the city, when given the amount of attention that this memorial service had in the media, a cloud based infrastructure would have been a better choice.