Cheaper Startup costs
For Small for Medium business especially new , a three pound monthly bill per user rather than an initial three hundred pound Office license is much cheaper during the first year not to mention more flexible. If the user quits the license the next monthly cost can be cancelled and email archived.
Stability
Economies of scale plays into this alot. Cloud providers ike Microsoft and Amazon invest heavilly into making sure they have multi layers of reduancy in regards to all layers of their infrasturcure as well as users existing on two datacenters just incase one gets destroyed in a natural diaster. Yes..... these services still go down from time to time however this will only get better with time!
Collaboration
The world is opening up wether Brexit or Trump proves otherwise! Small Business now can be under 10 people dotted around the world with the help of the internet. Internet connections from e.g. the U.K. to Australia are still not good enough yet to stream a Virtual Desktop Faultlessly. The cloud can now enable remote workers login to their local data center and work without the slowness of before.
Mobility
Mobiles and Tablets are taking on much more of the processing them previously thanks to good development and hardware. Cost of building Web Apps are more complex thanever due to security and amount of devices. Cloud providers work on unifying their apps to work across platform which saves internal development
Latest and Greatest
Companies especially Microsoft now are writing new features and products directly into the cloud which means you get these in your existing subscription for the same costs and it happens automatically, no need to wait for updating screens!
Scalibilty / Speed
One of the great perks about cloud is the scaling. You can start your organisation on a 5 seat E3 Office 365 license and grow up to 1000 seats by just increasing your subscription count! Let someone else worry about the building of new servers and data rooms while you continue to run your business. The amount of servers Microsoft have you can now start using this scalable resource for Business Intelligence straight into 365.
Intergration
Previously when you purchased some software for example Sage Accounting, to be able to export that data for example into Excel to be able to forecast and predict figures you would have you build custom written macros for this. With the invention of cloud it has started getting cloud providers to build API's and work with other third partners for click of the button intergration! For example a great Accounting Tool we use called Xero. To be able to keep track of our workforces expenses, we can use a seperate thirdparty tool called Receipt Bank and this how enable employees to submit their expense forms and receipts into Zero saving out Accoutant lots of work!