Abstract: This talk will be divided into two parts: an investigation of benefits that organisations can reap by using “Cloud Computing” providers to augment the computing capacity of their local infrastructure; and preliminary results on attempts to use virtual machines and CPU throttling to improve the energy efficiency of Web 2.0 applications. The first part evaluates the cost of seven scheduling strategies used by an organisation that operates a cluster managed by virtual-machine technology and seeks to utilise resources from a remote Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider to reduce the response time of its user requests. Simulation results demonstrate that naïve strategies can have a great impact on the amount paid by the organisation for using the remote resources, potentially increasing the overall cost with infrastructure. The second part of the talk will discuss early results on using features from Xen hypervisor, such as virtual CPU capping and pinning. It will demonstrate the impact on energy consumption of using these features and how they could be utilised when provisioning resources to a social calendar application.