Happy to know that your trying to setup cloud lab in our University. I am currently working on Cloud Orchestration projects. We use cloud labs for our development purpose. Let me share few points from which you get some insight how it would be useful if you setup in our university.
1. Cloud Lab is located at Banglore but we are able to access that lab from Chennai as well via our office laptops.
2. My requirement is completely different from my lead's requirement. I require Windows 2012 R2, where my lead needs Unix Server. But we use single cloud for the same.
3. As we recruit people into our team, we get access to them easily release it if someone leaves the team.
4. We use the cloud between 9AM-6PM. The same cloud is used by another team from 6 PM- 9AM at the onsite.
5.Our clients can easily monitor who is working on which task and who needs to be contacted if there is some issue. We have integrated Active directory to our tool which is in Cloud.
6. We are able to access our tool and developed work any time, any where.
These are the some of the benefits which I feel. I hope the same will reflect if cloud lab has been setup in our university. If the fund is more, kindly please go with Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Azure mam, which will be very useful for our students and research scholars.