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What Is a Public Cloud?

What Is a Public Cloud?

A public cloud is a type of cloud in which a set of services are delivered to businesses or organizations by third-party providers via the internet. Service providers offer resources such as applications, compute, and storage through free or pay-per-usage models.

How to Have Everything as a Service with Public Clouds

Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—these days it seems that technology companies are marketing everything as a service (XaaS). 

The XaaS trend owes its success to the ubiquity of public cloud service providers on the market. With a public cloud, it becomes possible for one company to lend its IT infrastructure resources to a large number of consumers. Instead of building out functionality yourself or investing in your own private cloud infrastructure, you can tap into the API economy and find a cloud service provider who gives you the service you want complete with the necessary storage and compute resources needed to run it. 

XaaS is popular because it’s a great business model for both the cloud service providers and the businesses using their services. You can even build an XaaS app largely made up of other public cloud services apps.

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The Benefits of Public Cloud

The benefits of public cloud computing include:

  • Reduced capital investment, maintenance, and update costs
  • Pay-as-you-use pricing models for flexible economics
  • The operational agility to leverage specialized features and compute and storage resources from seasoned cloud service providers

Why Choose Pure Storage for Your Public Cloud?

While public cloud offers the benefits of agility, cost efficiencies, and simplified operations, privacy and security are still big concerns for many enterprises. As much as ever, enterprise IT leaders continue to require the power, control, security, and peace of mind afforded by owning their own infrastructure. But to achieve digital transformation, data centers must deliver the benefits offered by the most innovative and compelling public cloud services. 

How can you get the best of both worlds? Consolidate all your storage and compute resources—on-premises and remote, public and private—into a single hybrid cloud. Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated gives you the ability to bring all your cloud resources under the unified umbrella of a single data management dashboard. Advantages of accessing your public cloud resources through Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated include:

  • High performance and reliability
  • Hybrid cloud mobility and data protection
  • Consistent automation and APIs across clouds

Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated gives you the same Purity interface you use to manage Pure on-premises all-flash arrays, but in the cloud.

11/2025
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