Public Cloud is a type of cloud computing where scalable and elastic and multi-tenant infrastructure capabilities are offered as a service to customers who access it outside of the user's’ organization. Public cloud services generate economies of scale by sharing resources among multiple customers and automating the provisioning, monitoring and management of the infrastructure. Public cloud services may be offered on a pre-pay or pay-per- usage model.

• Easy and inexpensive set-up because data center power, cooling and security, server hardware, and network infrastructure are purchased and packaged for customers in a granular manner. The high CAPEX costs and setup costs are covered by the provider.
• Access to elastic and scalable resources – the cloud has made compute, storage and network resources available like a commodity.
• No wasted resources - you pay for what you use.

The term "public cloud" arose to differentiate between the “traditional on-premise and company owned data center” model and the private cloud, a company owned network, data center and infrastructure that uses cloud computing technologies, such as virtualization, and is managed and used exclusively by the organization it serves. Examples of public clouds include I5Cloud, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Rackspace Cloud.