Public cloud services have a poor reputation among businesses, especially as they're managed by larger providers, with little control for the client organisation.

This mode of cloud operations can prove useful, however, as an implementation is often fast to set up, inexpensive to maintain and even easier to upgrade. What's more, with trends like the hybrid cloud continuing to grow, public offerings are becoming even more attractive.

This article will take a look at what the public cloud actually is, the growth predicted for this year and how the technology should be implemented within a business.

A look at the public cloud

These services are offered by large providers like Microsoft and Amazon, with the corporations managing the data centres and day-to-day upkeep of the services.

Compare this to a private cloud setup, which requires businesses to pay for the infrastructure and management costs themselves.

Private cloud services have the benefit of greater control, but there are the high capital costs required to actually purchase or lease the hardware, and the substantial amount of ongoing management to actually keep the services operational. Costs can again escalate if the business needs to expand the services – whether to take on new staff or open an additional office site.

Public cloud services are often priced through a subscription model, in which the business pays for the services they actually use. In turn, this makes it quite simple for the company to grow or shrink the services depending on the needs at the time.

Given the benefits of public cloud offerings, and the broader accessibility, it's no surprise that the services are set to grow in the future.

Public cloud on a growth path

The public cloud market in the Asia Pacific and Japan is set to grow 14.2 per cent this year, with a total estimate of US$7.4 billion (AU$8.9 billion).

Within this sector, cloud management and security have been pegged as the fastest growing segment of the market. This area is predicted to grow 29.9 per cent this year, reaching $264.5 million (AU$320 million).

"Many countries in the mature Asia/Pacific Japan region have solid reliable telecommunications infrastructure and relatively advanced technology usage profiles," said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner.

"Despite challenges in the global economy, we expect consistent and stable growth to continue through to 2018."

In addition, cloud management storage is also predicted to see expansion, with enterprises and government sectors leading the vanguard into this new mode of operations.

If businesses have stayed away from cloud services until now, this year could be the perfect time to start considering how the technologies could actually be put to use within their organisation. Certainly, there are a significant number of benefits to deploying the technologies.

For companies hesitant to go head first into a public service, there is always the hybrid approach – using elements of public cloud infrastructure whilst utilising private cloud technologies for other purposes.

Of course, any cloud approach is going to require strong management – largely to ensure there are no issues as the new technology is put in place.

Taking advantage of ITIL

Frameworks are an excellent way to realise change or transformation within an organisation, and the ITIL method is the best possible way to do so when it comes to IT.

With ITIL, organisations use a strong framework to keep the implementation on track throughout deployment – with the chance of errors or setbacks kept to a minimum.

As public cloud services are set to expand throughout this year it's going to be important for businesses to start considering how they can be put to use within an organisation.