What Is Public Cloud Definition, Advantages and Disadvantages?
When working with applications, hosting is an essential element to be planned. A good number of companies still manage their web and mobile applications on physical servers or shared servers.
However, it is neither commercially viable in the long run nor secures in many cases. Today, most businesses are moving to public cloud servers.
In simple terms, this refers to a server-network combination that uses software to split a large physical server into various virtual machines that can be accessed from anywhere.
We have already talked in detail about the benefits of cloud hosting.
What Is Public Cloud Definition?
Among the three cloud hosting options, public cloud solutions are used by most customer-facing businesses. They typically refer to a cloud-based service in which republic cloud definition sources from various physical servers provide a fast, scalable and flexible environment. In technical terms, it offers products and services as a combination of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Though the public cloud environment looks very similar to shared hosting, there is a slight difference in how shared hosting services work. It uses resources from multiple physical servers, which gives a lag-free performance to users. These shared resources ensure flexibility and are more cost-effective for businesses, small and large.
Large companies with dynamically changing environments can opt to offload their data centers to the public cloud and reduce the high operating costs of maintaining private data centers. For most customer-facing companies, it is an ideal option, considering its scalable nature and the pay-as-you-go feature offered by most service providers.
Smaller companies also have the advantage of accessing advanced resources for web and mobile application programming as accessed by more giant corporations and that too, at a fraction of a cost.
To give a perspective of the scale of operations, these IT majors simultaneously manage the web hosting of thousands of companies across the globe.
They manage the running of their websites, their web and mobile applications and, at any given point, are handling enormous amounts of critical data of millions of individual customers of these companies. The financial scale that these companies operate at is far beyond what smaller web hosting can manage.
How Public Cloud Works?
If you don’t want to have a private cloud for your cloud requirements, you may think about using a public cloud. It is among the most popular alternatives available for traditional on-premises servers. When using a public cloud, you should be aware of what it is and how it works.
When it comes to a public cloud model, you can discover numerous features, capabilities, and technologies. However, there are some unique characteristics that we can see in the public cloud as well. We will share a few of those characteristics in the upcoming section of this article.
The public cloud provider will supply you with the infrastructure that you need to host workloads and deploy them on the cloud. You can gain access to various services and tools, which will allow the customers to manage the cloud applications. For example, you can easily manage monitoring, security, and storage.
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Public Cloud Characteristics
Here are some of the most prominent features that you can find on a public cloud:
- There is a pool of resources in a public cloud
- You can find on-demand computing
- There is self-service provisioning capability in a public cloud
- You can access measured services
- There is a high level of security
- High availability and resiliency
- Broad network access
- High security
- Measured services
- Per-per-use pricing
Continue Reading, to learn more about advantages and disadvantages of public cloud.
Public Cloud Advantages
1- Cost-Effective
Companies experience reduced costs on data center maintenance, lesser hassles of upgrading software and hardware from time to match changing needs, lower maintenance costs as smaller teams can manage interactions with the cloud service provider, and an overall lower business operating cost , which allows the management to focus on revenue-generating avenues. It is believed that companies on public clouds save nearly 40% to 60% of costs compared to private data centers.
2- Flexibility
Since public cloud servers are not tied to specific locations, they offer better accessibility and flexibility concerning networking, data storage, and databases maintenance. They are also flexible on the pricing provided as usually, a user is billed as per a pay-as-you-use model. Users are billed only for the amount of CPU usage, bandwidth consumed and storage used.
3- Scalability
With customer demand growing dynamically, businesses need to scale up and, at times, scale down as and when needed. In addition, the time to deploy cannot be more than a few minutes, considering that today’s customer is always online. Public clouds provide infinite scalability, wherein resources can be managed to meet increasing traffic requirements.
4- Better Performance
Since public cloud service providers offer nearly unlimited access to the best resources irrespective of the organization’s size accessing them, performance is top-notch.
5- Reliability
The most important aspect that companies consider after costs are downtimes and overall reliability. Public Clouds are generally dispersed across data centers from various geographies. In the event of an outage on a particular data center, or a system overload, resources are drawn from other servers keeping applications running uninterrupted.
6- Innovation and Development
By getting access to APIs, SDNs, and other micro-services, developers are better equipped to translate their AI/ML/DL skills into advanced applications such as e-commerce Portals, Social Networks, etc.
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Public Cloud Disadvantages
1- Data Security
While data is secure on all forms of cloud formats, the public cloud is more vulnerable to security compromises than the private cloud.
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2- Flexibility Concerns
Though the public cloud offers immense flexibility, users get lesser control over their server specifications than those on a dedicated server. Companies usually switch to dedicated managed servers once they scale to a large extent. disorder, psychology, stress, crisis concept
3- Lack of Options
When it comes to a public cloud, you will not have a lot of options to consider. It is the public cloud services provider who will determine what configurations are available to you. You will even have to face data separation challenges as you use the public cloud.
4- Scarce Cloud Expertise
Lack of cloud expertise is a significant challenge associated with using the public cloud. There is a limited number of cloud experts, and they are not enough to cater to the demand. Even if you have to hire a cloud expert, you will have to spend a considerable amount of money out of your pocket. Hence, using the public cloud would not be a feasible solution for you to consider at all.
Is Public Cloud Secure?
There is no need to worry too much about the security of the public cloud. All you have to do is make sure that you buy your public cloud from a reputed services provider.
Because of the multi-tenant nature of the public cloud, many businesses are concerned about security. Because sensitive data and essential workloads are hosted in the cloud, environmental protection is a significant responsibility. Although public cloud providers provide various security services and technologies, cloud security involves both provider and client attention.
A shared responsibility model divides security responsibilities between the cloud provider and the cloud user. The specific features of security and responsibility for the supplier and the user are defined by this framework. Depending on the provider and public cloud model chosen, the particular duties under a security agreement vary.
The AWS shared-responsibility model, for example, specifies that AWS is responsible for safeguarding the cloud infrastructure, which includes hardware, software, network, storage, and on-premises facilities needed to execute AWS cloud services. Meanwhile, the cloud user is in charge of safeguarding anything that runs in the cloud, such as apps and client data.
Public Cloud Service Providers
The public cloud technologies are usually offered by large IT companies such as:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
- Oracle Cloud
- IBM Blue Mix
AWS, Microsoft, and Google are the top 3 in this segment, managing the web services of the majority of Fortune 500 companies.
The Marketplace for Public Cloud Services
Increasingly AWS is sweeping the market with its ever-growing market share. However, as per research done by Kentik, nearly 40% of companies go in for multiple providers. This is mainly to avoid the threat of vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in has been cited as one of the most important reasons companies opt for multiple cloud providers. As the competitive environment thickens by the day, companies are wary that service providers are upping the levels of stickiness elements, thereby making migration that much more complicated.
Impact of Changing Times on Public Cloud
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen more and more users on cloud applications such as video conferencing tools and remote access applications. Collaboration tools have become an integral part of cloud applications owned and operated by companies.
The data ownership game has gone up by a few notches, with the world adopting digital transformation almost without a choice.
Leading technology analyst firm Gartner had forecasted the public cloud services market to grow to buy 17% in 2020 to touch $266.4 billion.
The firm also predicted IaaS would see the fastest-growing public cloud spending at 24% in 2020 due to data center consolidation. Overall expenditure is more concentrated among the big three IaaS providers.
Today, as rightly predicted, Public Cloud spending is at an all-time high. According to IDC, the expenditure has surpassed traditional IT infrastructure in the second quarter of 2020. For more related information check this post out!
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