The challenge with on-premises technologies is not actually the speed with which they can be provisioned on behalf of the business. The issue, in reality, is that the time and resources spent licensing, deploying, and maintaining those resources distracts from and delays activities which actually bring value to the business. With traditional approaches, infrastructure and software licenses are the precious resources managed by engineering and operations rather than the data and services they support. The cost and business pressures facing IT organizations today focus attention on value and adopting approaches which allow focus and effort to be spent on the real jewels of the organization—the data and services which power insight and valuable outcomes.