A public cloud consists of cloud resources that are owned and operated by a third-party cloud provider. The resources and services are provided over the Internet and shared with other organizations. Public clouds are often multi-tenant, meaning that an organization's applications and data are hosted on the same hardware and networks with other organizations.
An organization will experience high reliability and practically unlimited scalability from the large number of resources that cloud providers own and manage. Organizations only have to pay for the services that are used and don't have to worry about the maintenance of the resources.
Although public clouds provide the best economies of scale among the different cloud types, it may not be the appropriate choice for some organizations. For data that is overly sensitive and/or subject to regulations, a public cloud may not meet all of a software application's requirements. With a public cloud, you lose some control over your data, which raises regulatory and compliance concerns regarding data storage and privacy. One example of this is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, which protects patient information. You must be aware of regulations that may affect your software, and ensure that either your team or the cloud provider can meet those requirements.