A fundamental concept behind cloud computing is that the location of the service, and many of the details such as the hardware or operating system on which it is running, are largely irrelevant to the user. This is an over-simplification of course; for many customers, location of their services and data remains a key issue. A provider's service-level agreement should specify a level of service uptime that's satisfactory to client business needs.

However, multi-cloud deployment and application development can be a challenge because of the differences between cloud providers' services and APIs. Multi-cloud deployments should become easier as cloud providers work toward standardization and convergence of their services and APIs. Industry initiatives such as Open Cloud Computing Interface aim to promote interoperability and simplify multi-cloud deployments.

These cloud services now include, but are not limited to, servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and business intelligence. The public cloud provider owns, manages and assumes all responsibility for the data centers, hardware and infrastructure on which its customers’ workloads run. It typically provides high-bandwidth network connectivity to ensure high performance and rapid access to applications and data. Typically, an internet connection known as a wide-area network (WAN) connects front-end users (for example, client-side interface made visible through web-enabled devices) with back-end functions (for example, data centers and cloud-based applications and services).

However, it can also be hosted on an independent cloud provider’s infrastructure or built on rented infrastructure housed in an offsite data center. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.

Many companies, particularly in Europe, have to worry about where their data is being processed and stored. European companies are worried that, for example, if their customer data is being stored in data centres in the US or (owned by US companies), it could be accessed by US law enforcement. As a result, the big cloud vendors have been building out a regional data centre network so that organizations can keep their data in their own region.

This simplifies the abstraction and provisioning of cloud resources into logical entities, letting users easily request and use these resources. Automation and accompanying orchestration capabilities provide users with a high degree of self-service to provision resources, connect services and deploy workloads without direct intervention from the cloud provider's IT staff. A multicloud environment can be as simple as email SaaS from one vendor and image editing SaaS from another. But when enterprises talk about multicloud, they typically refer to using multiple cloud services—including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services—from two or more leading public cloud providers. These include servers, networks, storage, operating system software, middleware and databases.

In the software as a service Cybersecurity threats (SaaS) model, users gain access to application software and databases. Cloud providers manage the infrastructure and platforms that run the applications. Cloud users do not manage the cloud infrastructure and platform where the application runs. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the cloud user's own computers, which simplifies maintenance and support. Cloud applications differ from other applications in their scalability—which can be achieved by cloning tasks onto multiple virtual machines at run-time to meet changing work demand.[54] Load balancers distribute the work over the set of virtual machines.