SMU Associate Professor of Information Systems (Education) Chris Boesch advised on how SMEs can use cloud computing to reduce waste and improve efficiency. He said that cloud computing offers SMEs a new alternative when they deploy new IT projects and systems. The presence of public cloud computing providers allows SMEs to rent - rather than buy - servers and storage from these large service providers and pay only for the resources they use. SMEs can therefore reduce their upfront capital expenditure for hardware, reduce their planning risk, and reduce the amount of wasted idle hardware capacity they might otherwise need to purchase and maintain.