A university requires a significant increase in web and database server resources for one week, twice a year, to handle student registration. The web servers remain idle for the rest of the year…

Local virtualization still requires purchasing and maintaining physical hardware that sits idle most of the year, which is not cost-effective compared to pay-as-you-go elastic cloud pricing.

Moving only the database servers to a private cloud increases cost and operational complexity for the tier that does not need burst elasticity, while missing the cost-saving opportunity for the idle web servers.

A private cloud requires significant upfront infrastructure investment and does not offer the on-demand pay-per-use pricing of a public cloud, making it more expensive for a twice-yearly workload spike.

Web servers are stateless and idle most of the year, so elastic public cloud billing means the university pays only during the two short registration periods instead of maintaining idle hardware year-round. Keeping the database servers local ensures sensitive student records remain under the university's direct security controls, avoiding the regulatory and data-residency risks of cloud-hosted databases.