When most people hear 'Cloud', it's the public cloud that they think of.

While this originally started out as applications hosted over the internet SAS (Software as a Service)today's public cloud often involves applications, infrastructure, or data storage, it's useful to think of these three services separately.

Public Cloud is best suited for data storage and archival, application hosting, latency intolerant or mission-critical web tiers, on-demand hosting for microsite and application, and auto-scaling environment for large applications. Advantages of public cloud:

• Lower costs - no need to purchase hardware or software, and you pay only for the service you use.
• No maintenance - your service provider provides the maintenance.
• Near-unlimited scalability - on-demand resources are available to meet your business needs.
• High reliability - a vast network of servers ensures against failure.