Types of Cloud and Their Applications | Journey To The Cloud Video Series (Part 2)

The first video of the video series “Journey To The Cloud” talked about the basics of cloud and its features.

Now, in the second video of the series, Geni Whitehouse sheds light on the different types of cloud and their applications. She digs deep into the type of cloud best suited for her fellow accountants and their clients.

Geni is a CPA, Keynote Presenter, co-founder of a bookkeeping business, and also a part-time winery consultant. She is the author of “How to Make a Boring Subject Interesting: 52 Ways Even A Nerd Can Be Heard” and was mentioned by Accounting Today as one of the top 100 most influential people in accounting in 2011. She was also named “One of the most powerful women in accounting” and one of the 25 thought leaders in the accounting profession by CPA Practice Advisor.

Let’s watch the video to know more-

Video Transcription:

Okay, now that you understand the cloud concept, let me tell you a little bit more about the different types of clouds that are available. First, you have Software-as-a-Service that you have probably heard some about, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and then Platform-as-a-Service.

Let’s talk about the one that you probably know the least about first, and that is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). That is a development environment that is deployed over the web via a browser interface, and it is really the application development tools made available to other developers of cloud solutions. The most common one of them, the most common platform is the service application Force.com made available by Salesforce.com to software developers inside its environment..

Software as a Service (SaaS) is something that has become more and more prevalent today, and that is where applications are developed for the cloud and deployed via the Internet and accessible via a browser. Common applications you may have heard of are QuickBooks Online, Salesforce.com, Dropbox, and Google Sheets, for example.

Fortunately for us accountants, most of the applications that we live and die by are not yet available for the cloud. The feature set that we have come to depend on is not accessible unless we access it via the desktop. That includes many applications that are practice management software or engagement software, where all of our work papers are kept and our tax software. Those feature sets are still only desktop-deployed today.

And it’s even worse for many of our clients. Those folks who are in a specialized industry who rely on a point-of-sale solution for example, or another industry vertical like construction, or other custom applications designed for the desktop, are not yet cloud-enabled.

So, what are we to do? Should we just sit around and wait? Should we switch to an application that doesn’t meet our needs?

No, we have a better solution, and that is the third type of cloud– Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

And in this environment, we can take those desktop applications that we know and love, deploy them in a secured protected environment on the cloud, and enable distributed access by all of our team members. So, we get the best of both worlds in that kind of environment. Bigger companies might be aware of solutions like Microsoft Azure and AWS. So, what we are looking for now is the solution that can be deployed in smaller companies, and that’s what we are going to learn more about later.

Next Up

Watch the next video to get insights from Geni Whitehouse into the different deployment models of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

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