Because Unisys' service is a private cloud offering, meaning the hardware is dedicated to individual customers rather than shared, the system is less efficient than a public cloud.

When a customer needs more capacity, it must add an entire blade or server, which could be more than it needs. "You do lose efficiencies, but that efficiency is already lost when the core decision is made to move from the public to a private cloud," Gross said. Public clouds are inherently more efficient because multiple customers may share compute power hosted by a single server.

On the back end, Unisys is using its uAdapt software, which is designed to allow data center managers to quickly repurpose servers.

Unisys has "automated that process of racking and stacking and cabling those servers that allows us to create a fairly real-time mechanism to increase and decrease capacity," Gross said.

In addition to the hosted private cloud offering, Unisys already has a public cloud and an internal private cloud offering. Each aims to address different needs. "What we've learned is that 'cloud' is not a big bang for our customers. It's a journey and evolution," Gross said. "That particular journey is different for each of our clients."