An educational institution wants to avoid buying hardware while providing students access to virtual labs. Which cloud advantage does this describe?

The correct answer is Capital expenditure reduction. By utilizing cloud services for virtual labs, the educational institution avoids the upfront cost of purchasing physical servers, networking equipment, and other infrastructure. This shifts the cost from a large, one-time capital expenditure (CapEx) to a more manageable, ongoing operational expenditure (OpEx). Operational expenditure is incorrect because while cloud computing involves OpEx, the question specifically asks about avoiding hardware purchases, which directly relates to CapEx reduction. High availability is a benefit of cloud computing but doesn't directly address the avoidance of hardware purchases. Multi-cloud adoption is a strategy for using multiple cloud providers and is not the primary advantage described here.