Cloud services act as the storage or third party vendors where the data of organization is stored for various purposes. The stored data is then retrieved for analytical purposes. The public cloud domain denotes, the cloud services offered over a public network that can be accessed remotely. The biggest advantage of having the public cloud model is that organizations will have limited concerns regarding the storage and maintenance of data. The setup is off-premise and the architecture type is multi-tenant where a number of organizations share the computing space of the third-party vendor. SME`s will be gain more benefits as they outsource the storage and maintenance of their data to third-party cloud vendors and thus save a lot on capital investments in setting up infrastructure. Cost savings, rapid building, testing and lesser time-to-market the product has attracted a lot of businesses across various verticals to adopt the public cloud technology.

Over the past decade, the software industry has witnessed massive changes. The deployment of cloud models by organizations being the foremost of them due to the stated advantages it offers. Highly scalable nature of businesses prompt them to opt for cloud based services as the data at storage centers can be scaled up and down as per the user requirements. Additionally, the pricing structure followed by the public cloud vendor's model is generally pay-as-per-use. The organizations especially SME's do not have to pay huge amounts in one go and thus makes it highly desirable for them to deploy public cloud model for their business operations. Core competency of businesses is maintained and hence allows them to stay competitive in this highly dynamic market.

Reduced operational costs and the plethora of solutions that are business specific offered from a single source are the primary drivers for the public cloud services market. Need for a scalable, flexible, easy and efficient IT infrastructure is also driving this market considerably. Human errors are minimized as the operations are totally machine operated and eventually attracts the organizations to adopt the public cloud services. The above drivers are the reasons behind the exponential adoption of this market.

In spite of being significantly adopted in developed countries of the world, the growth of public cloud services has experienced few constraints. Security concerns regarding the privacy of data has been the major restraining factor for this market. The internet connectivity requirements for this cloud model is high and in countries with poor connectivity will impact the implementation of public cloud. Also, the integration of the model with the legacy systems has been a restraining factor. The other restraints for this market include outages and data mobility.

The global public cloud market has been segmented by types into hardware, software and services. Further the public cloud market has been fragmented on the basis of delivery model into SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. In addition, this market has been further segmented based on end-users, namely: SME's and large enterprises. Public cloud market segmentation is also done on the basis of industry verticals that includes BFSI, Telecommunications, Hospitality & Retail, Government, Manufacturing and Healthcare.

North America leads the global public cloud market due to remarkable technological advancements and socio economic development of the region.. Europe which is another major industrial hub has been contributing to the growth of public cloud market. The NORDIC region in Europe with many small industries has largely contributed to the European market share for the public cloud market. Additionally, steadily catching up with these regions is the APAC region with developing countries like India and China gradually investing in public cloud technologies. Some of the key players operating within the global public cloud market include Microsoft Corporation, Salesforce.com, Cisco Systems, Inc., VMWare, Google, Inc., Oracle Corporation, and Eucalyptus among others.