Company B is an IT hosting company that provides a range of shared services used by a wide variety of customers. One of Company B's customers is Company A. Specifically, Company A's marketing department has been using a service hosted by Company B's on-premise environment. The service provides functions for conducting public surveys. Recently, Company A complained about Company B's billing practices and the reliability of its hosting environment. Company B currently charges all of its customers a flat fee, regardless of how much or how frequently a given customer uses the service. Furthermore, the public survey service has been repeatedly attacked and has therefore not always been available for Company A and other customers.

In response to the complaints from Company A, Company B is considering using a cloud-based hosting platform. Which specific characteristics of a cloud will be helpful to address Company B's problems?