[Trae Johnson]

A cloud environment and a virtual environment have numerous major differences. First, their ownership and location set them apart. A virtual environment is typically hosted on local, on-premises hardware that is owned and controlled by the company. In contrast, a cloud environment is hosted on third-party-owned remote servers, i.e., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. This also dictates how the resources are managed and accessed.

Second, scalability is much more dynamic in the cloud. Virtual environments are limited by the potential of the physical hardware they are hosted on, and scaling normally entails manual additions or upgrades to the hardware. Cloud environments, on the other hand, are highly scalable, and organizations can add or subtract resources on an as-needed basis automatically with minimal effort.

Lastly, cost structure is another primary distinction. Virtual environments entail considerable upfront expenses in buying and keeping up hardware, rendering them capital-intensive. Cloud environments, on the other hand, are based on a pay-as-you-go model, where organizations merely pay for the resources they truly utilize, transforming capital expenditures into more manageable operating expenses.