The most recognizable model of cloud computing to many consumers is the public cloud model, under which cloud services are provided in a virtualized environment, constructed using pooled shared physical resources, and accessible over a public network such as the internet. To some extent they can be defined in contrast to private clouds which ring—fence the pool of underlying computing resources, creating a distinct cloud platform to which only a single organization has access. Public clouds, however, provide services to multiple clients using the same shared infrastructure. A public cloud is the obvious choice when your standardized workload for applications is used by lots of people, such as e—mail. If you need to test and develop application code or  you have SaaS (Software as a Service) applications from a vendor who has a well implemented security strategy. The need for incremental capacity (the ability to add computer capacity for peak times), collaboration projects, and software development projects using a Platform—as—a—Service offering cloud are good reasons to use a public cloud. Public clouds are based on shared physical hardware which is owned and operated by a third—party provider.

The primary benefits of the public cloud include the speed with which you can deploy IT resources and the ability to pay only of the server resources you use. By spreading infrastructure costs across a number of users, each can take advantage of a low—cost, pay—as—you—go approach to IT provisioning. And, due to the sheer size of public clouds, you can scale compute power up and down as business demands, within a matter of minutes. A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet. The term public cloud arose to differentiate between the standard model and the private cloud, which is a proprietary network or data center that uses cloud computing technologies, such as virtualization. A private cloud is managed by the organization it serves. A third model, the hybrid cloud, is maintained by both internal and external providers. Examples of public clouds include Adobe Document Cloud™, Amazon AWS Elastic Compute Cloud™, Google Cloud™ and Microsoft Azure Cloud Services™ platform.

Public Cloud Platform Services

The most salient examples of cloud computing tend to fall into the public cloud model because they are, by definition, publicly available. Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings such as cloud storage and online office applications are perhaps the most familiar, but widely available Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, including cloud based web hosting and development environments, can follow the model as well (although all can also exist within private clouds). Public clouds are used extensively in offerings for private individuals who are less likely to need the level of infrastructure and security offered by private clouds. However, enterprise can still utilize public clouds to make their operations significantly more efficient, for example, with the storage of non—sensitive content, online document collaboration and web mail. A public cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are provided off site over the Internet. These clouds offer the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources; however, they are also more vulnerable than private clouds. Public clouds` capacity provides users with unlimited resources and investment savings.

Microsoft Azure Cloud

Microsoft™ understands that for you to realize the benefits of the cloud, you must be willing to entrust Microsoft™ cloud provider with one of Microsoft’s™ most valuable assets—Microsoft™ data. If you invest in a cloud service, you must be able to trust that Microsoft™ customer data is safe, that the privacy of Microsoft™ data is protected, and that you retain ownership of and control over Microsoft™ data—that it will only be used in a way that is consistent with Microsoft™ expectations. Microsoft™ strives to earn Microsoft™ trust in Microsoft Azure™. Microsoft™ long experience running online services has involved extensive investment in foundational technology that builds security and privacy into the development process. Over time, Microsoft™ developed industry leading security measures and privacy policies, and participated in international compliance programs with independent verification of how we measure up. Microsoft Azure™ meets a broad set of international and industry specific compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2, as well as country specific standards like Australia IRAP, UK G—Cloud, and Singapore MTCS.

Google Public Cloud

Use Google’s™ core infrastructure, data analytics and machine learning. Secure and fully featured for all enterprises. Google Cloud™ is committed to open source and industry leading price performance. Google Compute Engine’s™ instances can be moved to nearby hosts while active—even while under extreme load—complete with their working SSD storage (up to 1.5 TB). Since your VMs don’t need to be rebooted for host software updates or other standard operational tasks, uptimes are superb. 680,000 IOPS sustained local SSD read rate—all but the smallest flavors of Google Compute Engine™ can mount up to 1.5TB of Local SSD capable of 680k of sustained read performance. Competing systems max out at less than half that speed for nearly four times the cost, and are only available on certain instance sizes. Faster IOPS makes everything in your app faster, and lets you handle more users per instance. The same infrastructure that runs Google Apps™ is available to you on Google Cloud Platform™. Google’s™ global network footprint, with over 75 points—of—presence across more than 33 countries, ensures you receive the same low latency and responsiveness customers expect from Google’s™ own services.

Flexibility And Reliability

There are a myriad of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services available on the market which follow the public cloud model and that are ready to be accessed as a service from any internet enabled device. These services can fulfill most computing requirements and can deliver their benefits to private and enterprise clients alike. Businesses can even integrate their public cloud services with private clouds, where they need to perform sensitive business functions, to create hybrid clouds. The availability of public cloud services through an internet connection ensures that the services are available wherever the client is located. This provides invaluable opportunities to enterprise such as remote access to IT infrastructure (in case of emergencies etc) or online document collaboration from multiple locations. The sheer number of servers and networks involved in creating a public cloud and the redundancy configurations mean that should one physical component fail, the cloud service would still run unaffected on the remaining components. In some cases, where clouds draw resource from multiple data centers, an entire data center could go offline and individual cloud services would suffer no ill effect. There is no single point of failure which would make a public cloud service vulnerable.

Features And Benefits

Public clouds are easy and inexpensive to set—up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider. Public clouds provide scalability to meet organizational objectives.  Public clouds bring together greater levels of resource and so can benefit from the largest economies of scale. The centralized operation and management of the underlying resources is shared across all of the subsequent cloud services whilst components, such as servers, require less bespoke configuration. Some mass market propositions can even be free to the client, relying on advertising for their revenue. With ultimate scalability, cloud resources are available on demand from the public clouds’ vast pools of resource so that the applications that run on them can respond seamlessly to fluctuations in activity. A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available over the Internet.  Public cloud services often employ a pay as you go charging model whereby the consumer will be able to access the resource they need, when they need it, and then only pay for what they use.