By IT Brew Staff
3 min read
Definition:
A public cloud delivers on-demand cloud resources such as storage and compute to customers over the shared infrastructure of the public internet. Tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Microsoft offer public cloud services at a variety of price tiers.
No infrastructure? No software? No platform? No problem, according to supporters of an on-demand IT arrangement known as the public cloud.
A public cloud offers internet-connected services like storage, servers, and even emerging-tech services such as machine learning, so an IT pro can carry out whatever cloud-based activities they need without having to do all the setup themselves.
The benefits
With a public cloud, an organization pays the third-party provider—Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, let’s say—and therefore does not require on-site hardware to support applications. The multi-tenant setup offers its many users the chance to scale resources up or down, based on needs. The option also allows the third party to handle maintenance, patching, and security updates.
Cloud services also have accessibility advantages, given the capabilities can be accessed anywhere there’s an internet connection. Resources are also often distributed across multiple servers, to prevent downtime.
The drawbacks
That ceasing of control, however, can also be considered a disadvantage to an IT professional used to making custom configurations. Additionally, a move to the public cloud is not automatically cheaper than hosting IT in on-site data centers, according to at least one former tenant.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike argues that, while public users maintain control of their cloud-hosted data and applications, the infrastructure—common to all customers—also represents a multi-tenant target for adversaries.
Privacy please
It’s worth contrasting the public cloud with a private cloud—owned and maintained by an org or third party—which provides exclusive, on-demand IT services for a single organization. With a private cloud, the computing resources are isolated and not shared with other organizations.
What AI means for the public cloud
In 2024, Amazon led among Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) providers, with 37.7% market share, according to Gartner, followed by Microsoft at 23.9%, and Google at 9%. Gartner also reported that public cloud services revenue grew 22.5% year-over-year in 2024, thanks largely to cloud vendors investing in “AI infrastructure.”
Public clouds offer organizations the opportunity to use emerging tech like GenAI, and not have to build their own (expensive) infrastructure.
According to a recent report from TD Securities, customers expect the overall public cloud spend to rise 22% year over year in 2026, and the share of workloads on these platforms to increase 24% in five years, thanks to rising GenAI adoption and a rise in GenAI workloads migrating to hyperscalers like AWS and Azure.
