 Hosting the runtime in the cloud provides certain advantages and potential cost savings compared to hosting the runtime on premises as it simplifies the maintenance and application of OS-level patches which can sometimes be disruptive to business continuity.Also, cloud hosting of IBM ACE runtime allows easy expansion of capacity by adding more horsepower to the CPU configuration of a cloud environment or by adding additional nodes in an Active-Active configuration.Another advantage of maintaining ACE runtimes in the cloud is the ability to configure access to your ACE functionality separate and apart from your internal network using DataPower or API Connect devices.