What is the advantage of cloud computing in this circumstance if a Data Scientist at work has approached you and stated that they want some incredibly large servers to undertake an analysis of past customer data? They will require the servers for around 24 hours, after which they will simply want the analytic findings stored in a file service.

Cloud computing provides on-demand infrastructure for ad-hoc requests like these, making it an excellent match for the scenario. You may not have the huge servers essential in a typical data center because they are in use by another team or system, or you may not be able to purchase the huge servers required. You can receive the servers you need on-demand using Cloud Computing and then delete them once you're done (backing up the results elsewhere before deleting).