The public cloud has transformed IT infrastructure, and it continues to do so.

This feature, written by Drew Robb for TechRepublic Premium, provides an overview of the public cloud, its growth trajectory, the types available, how it differs from private and hybrid clouds, the benefits, drawbacks, and what to expect in an AI-dominated future.

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  BENEFITS

  The initial allure of the public cloud was elimination of capital expenditure. Organizations faced refresh cycles for servers and other equipment every three to five years. Thus, they had to come up with large sums of money to buy that gear — and they had to invest vast amounts of IT time in decommissioning aging equipment, selecting new equipment, and deploying the new servers and hardware once it arrived. Further, they had to move applications and data from the old equipment to the new.

  This inefficient model was replaced by the cloud. Organizations order what they want from third-party providers that are responsible for upgrading their own infrastructure, dealing with updates, security, redundancy, and more. This effectively changed large portions of the IT budget from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, i.e., organizations pay a monthly or yearly rate for cloud resource consumption, which spreads costs across time. In many cases, the move to the public cloud also reduced cost due to the economies of scale provided by cloud service providers.

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TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 18 hours of dedicated writing, editing, research, and design.